Publication day
Basel railway station, Switzerland
28 November 2010
“Launch! Launch! Launch!”
GUARDIAN NEWSROOM
It was Sunday morning at the sleepy Badischer Bahnhof. Few were around. The station sits precisely on the border between Germany and Switzerland. It is a textbook example of European co-operation – with the Germans providing the trains, and the Swiss running the cafes and newspaper kiosks. This morning, however, the station would become briefly notorious for something else: a gigantic foul-up.
Early in the morning, a van rolled in, bearing 40 copies of the German news magazine Der Spiegel. The weekly normally starts distributing copies to newsagents over the weekend, with revellers in Berlin able to buy it late on Saturday night on their way home. But on this occasion – as with the publication of the Afghan war logs – Der Spiegel was supposed to have held all copies of its edition back. The international release of the US embassy cables had been painstakingly co-ordinated for 21.30 GMT that Sunday evening. The Guardian, New York Times, El Pais and Le Monde were all waiting anxiously to push the button on the world’s biggest leak. Der Spiegel had agreed to roll its stories out at the same time on its website, with the magazine only published on the following Monday morning. Everyone knew the script.
But the gods of news had decided to do things differently. At around 11.30am Christian Heeb, the editor-in- chief of the local Radio Basel, discovered a copy of Der Spiegel at the station. It was dated 29/11/10. It cost €3.80. The front cover was nothing less than sensational: “Revealed: How America Sees the world”. The strap-line confirmed: “The secret dispatches of the US foreign ministry”. Against a red background was a photo-gallery of world leaders, each accompanied by a demeaning quotation culled from the US cables. Angela Merkel, Germany’s increasingly un popular chancellor, was “risk averse and rarely creative”. Guido Westerwelle, Merkel’s disastrous foreign minister, was “aggressive”. Then there were the others. Vladimir Putin? “Alpha dog”. Dmitry Medvedev? “Pale and hesitant”. Silvio Berlusconi? “Wild parties”. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? “Hitler”. Next to Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi were the tantalising words “Luxuriant blonde nurse”. More extraordinary revelations were promised inside.
Heeb’s station started to broadcast the news, saying a few early copies of Der Spiegel had become available at Basel station. It was at this point that an anonymous Twitter user called Freelancer_09 decided to check out the prospect for himself. He tweeted: “Der Spiegel zu fruh am Badischen Bahnhof Basel! Mal schaun was da steht.” (Der Spiegel too early at Basel station! Let’s see what’s there.) Freelancer_09 managed to obtain one of the last two or three copies of the rogue Spiegel batch, just as panicked executives at the magazine’s Berlin headquarters were realising something had gone horribly wrong: one of the distribution vans sent to crisscross Germany had set off for Switzerland 24 hours too early.
Radio Basel in Switzerland received a hasty phone call from Germany. Would they come off the air in return for subsequent help with the story? But it was too late. Freelancer_09 was already at work: within minutes he had begun tweeting the magazine’s contents. Merkel had a better relationship with US president George W Bush than with his successor Barack Obama! US diplomats have a low opinion of Germany’s regional politicians! The Americans think Westerwelle is a jerk! At the start of the morning Freelancer_09 had a meagre tally of 40 Twitter followers. His own political views seemed pretty clear – alternative, counter-cultural, even anarchist – judging from the leftist Twitter users he followed, and from his own profile photo: a child shouting through a loud-hailer above the words: “Police state”. Who he was exactly was uncertain. (His identity remained mysterious; some weeks later his Twitter account went dormant.)
Soon, word spread through the blogosphere that an anonymous local journalist in Basel had stumbled on the Holy Grail. Other German journalists started “retweeting” his posts. Der Spiegel frantically messaged him to make contact. He ignored them. “His Twitter follows rapidly snowballed. We could see it was becoming a serious problem,” admits Der Spiegel’s Holger Stark. “While we were closing the hole, he had managed to get a copy of the magazine.”
Sitting helplessly in London, Alan Rusbridger realised that the 9.30pm GMT embargo for the release of the cables looked wobbly. “You have five of the most powerful news organisations, and everything was paralysed by a little freelancer. We started having conferences on the hour wondering what to do,” Rusbridger says. There was more bad news. Rival German news organisations contacted Freelancer_09 and asked him to start scanning entire pages of Der Spiegel’s edition. By about 3pm, he had 150 followers, with more joining every minute. By 4pm he had found a scanner, and was pumping the embargoed articles out onto the internet. His followers jumped to around 600. A French mirror site began translating Freelancer_09’s posts. “We realised the story wasn’t going to hold. We had sprung a leak ourselves,” Rusbridger recalls wryly. It was a great irony. Rusbridger had been an early Twitter proselytiser; he had relentlessly encouraged Guardian journalists to sign up to the San Francisco-based micro-blogging site. Now Twitter had turned round and – figuratively speaking – skewered him in the bottom.
The previous day, Saturday, at around 5pm a German technician from Der Spiegel’s own online service in Hamburg had made an earlier gaffe: he managed to go live on the website with an extract from the edition of the magazine. It gave a few intriguing early details: that there were 251,287 cables; that one cable dated back to 1966, but most were newer than 2004; that 9,005 documents dated from the first two months of 2010. Stark apologised for the accident and said the German link was erased as soon as it was discovered. The screen shots circulated through the net for some time. Then on Sunday afternoon more material appeared on Spiegel’s popular English-language site. The rumours were now sweeping feverishly across Twitter. The anticipation was reaching bursting point.
The New York Times soon spotted the Spiegel online story. The paper’s executives said the embargo was dead – now effectively meaningless. “What was so brilliant was the irony that of all the people to mess up it was the Germans,” said Katz – not always the Guardian’s most politically correct representative. Until now, it was the Germans – impeccably ethical at all times – who had managed to avoid the recriminations hurled freely by Assange at both the Americans and the British. Janine Gibson, editor of guardian.co.uk, the Guardian’s website, compared the pratfall-strewn cables launch to Britain’s 1993 Grand National. That shambolic instalment of the historic horse race was infamously cancelled after two false starts.
“It all got terribly untidy,” Rusbridger says. “But it was the most complicated thing we have ever done, co- ordinating a Spanish morning paper with a French afternoon paper with a German weekly with an American [paper] in a different time zone and a bunch of anarchists in a bunker who would only communicate via Jabber [online instant messaging].”
