WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

“No, we’re not.”

“Thank you very much.”

Rusbridger did decide to tell the Americans the Guardian’s broad publication schedule. Day one, he said was to feature Iran, with North Korea on day two and Pakistan on day three. Then the conversation was over.

In Germany, the editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel had taken a call from the US ambassador. He told Georg Mascolo that there was huge concern at the “highest, highest levels” about the security of sources: “Lives could be in jeopardy.” Mascolo replied that Der Spiegel had done everything it could to protect sources who might be in danger. He invited the state department to share with him their areas of concern.

The New York Times had been holding its own sometimes tense negotiations with US government officials. The paper’s lawyers were confident that it could report on the secret documents without violating American law. But Bill Keller felt a large moral and ethical responsibility to use the material responsibly: “While we assumed we had little or no ability to influence what WikiLeaks did, let alone what would happen once this material was loosed in the echo chamber of the blogosphere, that did not free us from the obligation to exercise care in our own journalism. From the beginning we determined that in our articles and in any documents we published from the secret archive we would excise material that could put lives at risk,” he wrote later.

The New York Times’s policy was to err on the side of caution. With the Afghan and Iraq war logs, the paper redacted names of all sources who had spoken to US soldiers and diplomats, and edited out details that might have revealed continuing intelligence-gathering operations or military tactics. But because of the range of the material and the hypersensitivities of diplomacy, the embassy cables were bound to be more explosive than the war logs, Keller considered.

Dean Baquet, the New York Times’s Washington bureau chief, gave the White House an early warning on 19 November. Five days later, the day before Thanksgiving, Baquet and three colleagues were invited to a windowless room in the state department, where they encountered an unsmiling crowd: representatives of the White House, the state department, the director of national intelligence, the CIA, the Defence Intelligence Agency, the FBI and the Pentagon, gathered around a conference table. Others, who never identified themselves, lined the walls. A solitary note-taker tapped away on a computer.

The meeting was off the record, but it is fair to say the mood was tense. Scott Shane, one of the reporters who participated in the meeting, described “an undertone of suppressed outrage and frustration”. Subsequent meetings and daily conference calls were less prickly and more businesslike, Keller says. The US administration had three areas generally of concern. It wanted to protect individuals who had spoken candidly to US diplomats in oppressive countries – something the New York Times was happy to do. It also wanted to remove references to secret American programmes relating to intelligence. Lastly, it did not want the paper to reveal candid remarks by heads of state and other top foreign officials, and feared publication would strain relations with those countries. “We were mostly unpersuaded,” Keller recalls.

This was, of course, hardly the first time the New York Times had published secrets that discomfited the US government. Before the year of WikiLeaks, nothing the paper had done on Keller’s watch had caused quite the agitation of two articles the paper published about tactics employed by the Bush administration after the attacks of 11 September 2001. One article, which was published in 2005 and won a Pulitzer prize, revealed that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping on domestic phone and email conversations without the legal courtesy of a warrant. The other, published in 2006, described a vast treasury department programme to screen international banking records.

The editor had vivid memories of sitting in the Oval Office as President George W Bush tried to persuade him and the New York Times’s publisher to withhold the eavesdropping article. Bush told him that if the paper published, it should share the blame for the next terrorist attack. Unconvinced, the paper published anyway, and the reaction from the government and conservative commentators in particular was vociferous.

This time around, the US administration reaction was different. It was, for the most part, sober and professional. The Obama White House, while strongly condemning WikiLeaks for making the documents public, did not seek an injunction to halt publication. There was no Oval Office lecture, no plea to Keller or the publisher not to write about the documents. “On the contrary, in our discussions before the publication of our articles, White House officials, while challenging some of the conclusions we drew from the material, thanked us for handling the documents with care. The secretaries of state and defence and the attorney general resisted the opportunity for a crowd-pleasing orgy of press-bashing,” Keller says, adding: “Though the release of these documents was certainly painfully embarrassing, the relevant government agencies actually engaged with us in an attempt to prevent the release of material genuinely damaging to innocent individuals or the national interest.”

From his secret hideout back in Ellingham Hall, Assange sought to open his own channel of negotiations, sending a letter on 26 November to the US embassy in London. Headed “Julian Assange, editor-in-chief, WikiLeaks”, it began: “Dear Ambassador Susman, I refer to recent public statements by United States government officials expressing concern about the possible publication by WikiLeaks and other media organisations of information allegedly derived from United States government records.”

Assange invited the US government to “privately nominate” examples where publication of a cable could put an individual “at significant risk of harm”. He promised WikiLeaks would quickly consider any US government submissions ahead of publication. The state department’s legal adviser Harold Koh sent an uncompromising letter back. It stated that the cables “were provided in violation of US law and without regard for the grave consequences of this action”.

Releasing them “would place at risk the lives of countless individuals”, jeopardise ongoing military operations, and threaten co-operation between the US and its allies and partners, the letter said. It would hinder co-operation on “common challenges such as terrorism, pandemic diseases and nuclear proliferation”.

The letter ordered WikiLeaks to halt plans to publish the cables, hand back the stolen files, and “destroy all records of this material from WikiLeaks’ databases.”

Assange wrote to Susman again on 28 November. He made clear that WikiLeaks had no intention of putting anybody at risk, “nor do we wish to harm the national security of the United States”. He continued: “I understand that the United States government would prefer not to have the information that will be published in the public domain and is not in favour of openness. That said, either there is a risk or there is not. You have chosen to respond in a manner which leads me to conclude that the risks are entirely fanciful and that you are instead concerned only to suppress evidence of human rights abuses and other criminal behaviour.”

The negotiations with the state department – such as they were – thus terminated. All that was left was to prepare for simultaneous publication of the biggest leak in the history. What could possibly go wrong?