By 6pm the Guardian and everyone else agreed just to publish, go with it. As though at Nasa’s Mission Control Center in Houston, the Guardian’s production staff stood poised at the newspaper’s King’s Cross office in front of a flickering bank of screens. Production boss Jon Casson asked: “Will we launch?” Katz replied: “LAUNCH!” The word was taken up and spread instantly across the back bench, the newsroom echoing with the words: “Launch! Launch! Launch!” The world’s biggest leak had gone live.
The Guardian’s front-page splash made the historic dimensions of the story clear. With David Leigh’s byline, it appeared on guardian.co.uk at 6.13pm. The headline proclaimed: “US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomatic crisis.” It began:
“The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies, many sent as recently as February this year. At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables – many designated ‘secret’ – the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN leadership.”
The story went on: “These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches, which were obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers’ website, also reveal Washington’s evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues.”
At 6.15pm the Guardian launched a WikiLeaks live blog, to chart reaction as it came in. More live blogs would follow; they would become an innovative part of the cables coverage. The disclosures in Leigh’s story were the first of many over the next four weeks. Despite its scrappy launch, the publication of the US state department cables amounted to the biggest leak since 1971 when Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon papers to the New York Times, provoking a historic court case and revealing the White House’s dirty secrets in Vietnam. This data spillage was far bigger – an unprecedented release of secret information from the heart of the world’s only superpower.
Nobody could think of a bigger story – certainly not one authored by the media themselves. “You could say the World Trade Center was a bigger story, or the Iraq war. But in terms of a newspaper, where by the act of publication you unleash one story that is then talked about in every single corner of the globe, and you are the only people who have got it, and you release it each day, this was unique,” Rusbridger says.
The US state department had already assembled a team of 120 people, to burn the midnight oil and sift through those cables likely to be disclosed. The department also issued a condemnatory statement. It said: “We anticipate the release of what are claimed to be several hundred thousand classified state department cables on Sunday night that detail private diplomatic discussions with foreign governments. By its very nature, field reporting to Washington is candid and often incomplete information. It is not an expression of policy, nor does it always shape final policy decisions. Nevertheless, these cables could compromise private discussions with foreign governments and opposition leaders, and when the substance of private conversations is printed on the front pages of newspapers around the world, it can deeply impact not only on US foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world.” The release of the cables was a “reckless and dangerous action”. It had put lives at risk, the White House declared.
The statement was a damage limitation exercise. Even opponents of WikiLeaks had to acknowledge that some of the disclosures – for example, that the US had spied on UN officials and sought to gather their credit card account numbers – were overwhelmingly in the public interest. The White House, moreover, frequently expressed concern when other authoritarian regimes clamped down on freedom of speech. This testy response when the leak came from inside its own large governmental machinery would provoke the Russians, Chinese, and just about everyone else, to accuse Washington of double standards.
The Guardian posted its own riposte. It pointed out that the paper had carefully redacted many cables. This was done “in order to protect a number of named sources and so as not to disclose certain details of special operations”.
The New York Times also vigorously defended its decision to publish: “The cables tell the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money. They shed light on the motivations – and, in some cases, the duplicity – of allies on the receiving end of American courtship and foreign aid. They illuminate the diplomacy surrounding two current wars and several countries, like Pakistan and Yemen, where American military involvement is growing. As daunting as it is to publish such material over official objections, it would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name.”
Franco Frattini, Italy’s foreign minister, was one of the earliest politicians to grasp that the leak could not be undone, and was game-changing. “It will be the 9/11 of world diplomacy,” he exclaimed. For once the comparison didn’t look like hyperbole. “It was being discussed in the White House, the Kremlin, the Elysee, by Berlusconi and the UN, by Chavez, in Canberra, in every capital city of the world,” Rusbridger said. “The ones where it wasn’t being discussed, you knew they were bracing themselves. You just had this sense of mayhem being let loose. All these incredibly powerful people, the most powerful people in the world, were scrambling into emergency board meetings.”
At Kings Place, the following day’s editorial conference was more crowded than usual. Morning conferences are a Guardian ritual: the heads of department – home, foreign, city, sport, as well as features, comment and arts – give a quick run-down of the day’s offerings. All staff can attend and anybody can speak. The seating arrangement mirrors the Guardian’s unspoken hierarchy: Rusbridger sits in the middle of an elongated yellow sofa; junior staff perch uncomfortably on stools around the glass walls. After the news roundup the editor typically says: “What else?” The words are often hard to hear. It is a brave, or foolish, person who opens the debate; sometimes the silence extends awkwardly for 10 seconds. This morning, however, there was no hesitation. The room was packed; the atmosphere one of excitement, and astonishment that the Guardian had managed, with a few glitches, to pull the story off.
One of the unfamiliar faces there was Luke Harding, the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, who had mined the cables for a series of hard-hitting stories about Russia and who, having just returned again from Moscow, stood unshaven and jet-lagged next to the door. Ian Katz recalled Sunday’s dramatic events and explained the decision to bring forward publication when it became clear that Cablegate itself had sprung a leak. Katz described the Guardian’s sitcom-style wranglings with its many Euro-partners: “It was a cross between running a Brussels committee and an episode of ’Allo ’Allo! ” He came up with a characteristically rococo analogy – “like being a kind of air traffic controller, with several small aircraft crashing at Stansted but managing to land a couple of big jets at Heathrow”.
The Guardian’s website had gone “absolutely tonto”, Janine Gibson reported. The story produced remarkable traffic – the 4.1 million unique users clicking on it that day was the highest ever. Record numbers would continue, with 9.4 million browsers viewing WikiLeaks stories between 28 November and 14 December. Some 43% of them came from the US. The Guardian team had designed an interactive graphic allowing readers to carry out their own searches of the cable database. This feature became the most popular aspect of the Guardian’s coverage. People from around the world looked to see what US officials had privately written about their rulers. “This was really pleasing,” says Gibson. “People were looking for themselves and engaging with the cables and not just the Assange-ness.”
