WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

Assange thus faced a formidable list of challenges as he sat around the Christmas Day lunch table with Vaughan Smith and his family – though you might not have guessed it from his decision to sport a Santa suit and play up to the camera lens for a gossipy Newsweek photo-shoot. But the man who had caused such a worldwide commotion had not lost his strengths.

He promptly succeeded in obtaining a contract to write his memoirs for more than a million pounds ($1.6m). This deal, brokered by literary agent Caroline Michel with Knopf in the US and Canongate in the UK, plus several foreign publishers, assuaged some of his money worries. “I don’t want to write this book but I have to,” he explained. He was liable to get more than ?250,000 immediately in advances, although a six-figure chunk would have to be set aside to hire a ghostwriter. Michel’s agency also set up a meeting with Paul Greengrass, acclaimed director of The Bourne Ultimatum, with a view to him turning Assange’s life-story into a secret-agent escapade. The book, WikiLeaks Versus the World: My Story, was scheduled for release in April 2011 – an ambitious deadline.

Another piece of good news was the diminishing prospect that Assange would personally become the victim of some kind of vengeful US drone-strike. The US department of justice had issued secret subpoenas on 14 December for the Twitter accounts of Manning, Assange and his friends. This led to unwelcome publicity when Twitter robustly went to court and got the subpoena unsealed. Icelandic MP and WikiLeaks supporter Birgitta Jonsdottir made a political fuss. “It sort of feels to me as if they’ve become quite desperate,” Jonsdottir said. The investigation was fruitless, she added, since “none of us would ever use Twitter messaging to say anything sensitive”. If the US was reduced to chasing tweets, their legal pursuit appeared to have become slightly less menacing.

Contrary to the bloodcurdling claims made in public about the crimes of WikiLeaks, senior state department officials in fact appeared to have concluded by mid-January that the WikiLeaks controversy had caused little real and lasting damage to American diplomacy. The Reuters news agency reported on 19 January 2011 that in private briefings to Congress top US diplomats admitted the fall-out from the release of thousands of private diplomatic cables across the globe had not been especially bad. One congressional official briefed on the reviews told Reuters that the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers. “I think they want to present the toughest front they can muster,” the officials said.

The tacit retraction of Hillary Clinton’s lurid claim that the release of the WikiLeaks cables had been an attack on the entire international community followed the equally low-key admission that Assange did not in fact have “blood on his hands” from the release of the earlier Iraq and Afghan war logs.

But the publicity – and the controversy – had achieved something very valuable for him. WikiLeaks had, as a result of the rows, become a stupendous global brand. Writing in the New York Times, Evgeny Morozov, the cyber-analyst from Stanford University, saw a wonderful possible future. He argued that WikiLeaks could have two major advantages over any of its imitators: a widely and easily recognisable brand and an extensive network of contacts in the media. Following several years in “relative obscurity” it had now become the “media’s darling”. He envisaged that WikiLeaks could “morph into a gigantic media intermediary”, as a journalistic clearing-house: “Under this model, WikiLeaks staffers would act as idea salesmen relying on one very impressive digital Rolodex.”

Ian Katz, the Guardian’s deputy editor, put the position trenchantly at a debate organised by the Frontline Club in mid-January. “I think Julian has used his profile very cleverly and what he is doing is trying to make himself the brand, if you like, that is synonymous with whistleblowing … He wants you to think if you are a pissed off analyst in [the military] or wherever and you have got something you want to share with the world, ‘I will send it to that Assange fellow, not to the Guardian.’ Which poses a really interesting question for traditional media partners like us – have we helped to create, as it were, a brand which people will go to in place of traditional media?”

WikiLeaks had also spawned a host of clone sites which were not so much competitors as admiring tributes: IndoLeaks, BrusselsLeaks, BalkanLeaks, ThaiLeaks, PinoyLeaks. Some were reposting American embassy cables. Others were publishing material from their own sources. Assange’s concept of an online site for anonymous whistleblowing activists seemed to be going viral – as, perhaps, he always believed it might – while he continued his own plan to spend months sending leaked cables to journalists in an ever-widening range of countries.

One of the most interesting – and subtle – immediate positive outcomes of the WikiLeaks saga was in one of those normally obscure countries. Following the publication of excoriating leaked cables from the US mission in Tunisia, about the corruption and excess of the ruling family, tens of thousands of protesters rose up and overthrew the country’s hated president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

Was this a WikiLeaks revolution? Not quite. It began after an unemployed 26-year-old university graduate, Mohammed Bouazizi, set fire to himself in desperation. Officials had prevented him from selling vegetables. His death triggered nationwide rioting over joblessness and political repression. It was long-simmering frustrations with the Ben Ali regime which were behind the revolt. The Tunisians were the first people in the Arab world to take to the streets and oust a leader for a generation. But they already knew their ruling family was debauched; they didn’t need WikiLeaks for that.

There was, however, a genuinely extraordinary WikiLeaks effect. “Sam”, a pseudonymous young Tunisian writing on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site in mid-January, specifically referenced WikiLeaks as he described how a resigned cynicism about the regime under which he’d grown up turned to hope:

The internet is blocked, and censored pages are referred to as pages “not found” – as if they had never existed. Schoolchildren are exchanging proxies and the word becomes cult: “You got a proxy that works?” … We love our country and we want things to change, but there is no organised movement: the tribe is willing, but the leader is missing. The corruption, the bribes – we simply want to leave. We begin to apply to study in France, or Canada. It is cowardice, and we know it. Leaving the country to “the rest of them”. We go to France and forget, then come back for the holidays. Tunisia? It is the beaches of Sousse and Hammamet, the nightclubs and restaurants. A giant Club Med.

And then, WikiLeaks reveals what everyone was whispering. And then, a young man immolates himself. And then, 20 Tunisians are killed in one day. And for the first time, we see the opportunity to rebel, to take revenge on the “royal” family, who have taken everything, to overturn the established order that has accompanied our youth. An educated youth, which is tired and ready to sacrifice all the symbols of the former autocratic Tunisia with a new revolution: the jasmine revolution – the true one.

Paradoxically the leaked comments by the US ambassador in Tunis, widely read across the region, played a major role in boosting Washington’s image on the Arab street. Ordinary Tunisians liked the way in which the Americans – unlike the French – had so frankly highlighted corruption. They now wanted the US to support their on-going jasmine revolution. They asked Washington to exert pressure on neighbouring Arab leaders, and prevent them from interfering.

Muammar Gaddafi, the despot in neighbouring Libya, had no problem in acknowledging a link between events in Tunis and WikiLeaks – a demonic link, so far as he was concerned. Gaddafi said he was pained by Ben Ali’s overthrow and “concerned for the people of Tunisia, whose sons are dying each day”. He warned Tunisians not to