Inside WikiLeaks

by Daniel Domscheit-Berg

  It would be an exaggeration to say that this inflated my ego. I didn’t exactly suffer from an inferiority complex to begin with. But if you’ve just shot down and killed a horde of bears, you do walk through the world with a bit broader shoulders.

  It wasn’t far from my apartment to the lefty alternative macrobiotic shop where I bought my groceries. The shop was called Hazelnut, and it was only two streets away. I didn’t have much contact anymore with the nondigital world, and the shop was one of the few places I still interacted with people face-to-face. Whenever I entered the shop after our adventure with Julius Bär, I felt like saying, “If you knew who we just fucked over, you’d laugh.”

  The same three people always worked in the shop, and we’d chat sometimes while they packed the cream or Schwedenmilch I had just bought. At one point, they asked what I did for a living. I tried to tell them about the Internet and the fight against corruption, but I think the only thing they got out of my attempts at an explanation was that I was one of those crazy IT lunatics. They smiled as they put a jar of fair-trade peanut butter in my bag. “A free sample,” they said. The conversation turned to sandwich spreads. They were more interested in that than in me. Two years later, when I was back in Wiesbaden visiting my parents, they recognized me. They had seen my face on TV.

  But back to 2008. There were always newspapers lying about at Hazelnut—small publications that wrote about the world from a queer and/or Marxist perspective, not the big mainstream newspapers. A couple of them had run articles about the Julius Bär story. Sometimes I would glance over at the pile and laugh to myself. The employees at Hazelnut had no idea that one of those WikiLeaks people described in those articles was none other than the haggard, poorly shaven guy in printed T-shirts who bought his breakfast cream from them every day.

  *Denotes that the name has been changed.

  THERE wasn’t time for us to rest on our laurels. A short while after the Julius Bär leaks, we received the first documents concerning Scientology. We didn’t know where they had come from. But it could hardly have been a coincidence that around the same time, a host of “Anonymous” users began chatting on our site.

  Anonymous was an international group of Net activists who had declared war on Scientology. They owed their name to the fact that Internet users who want to participate in forums or image boards without revealing their identities are always given “Anonymous” as a user name. The members of the group could be recognized by the Guy Fawkes mask they have borrowed from the graphic novel V for Vendetta. Guy Fawkes was an English revolutionary who tried to blow up the British Parliament in 1605, and the protagonists in V for Vendetta wore masks with a likeness of his face. Members of Anonymous also used Guy Fawkes masks whenever they appeared in YouTube videos or public acts of protest.

  The masks with their pointy beards and horrifically frozen grins are somewhat unsettling. The German Anonymous website, though, explained that the disguises were inspired by their own fear of their enemy, Scientology:

  It might appear as though we are trying to frighten people, but we aren’t. Scientology has no qualms about persecuting ordinary citizens who protest against their machinations. What we mean by persecute is shadowing and harassing individuals just because they do not share Scientology’s view of the world. We are only protecting ourselves against intimidation and harassment. The Scientology organization is incredibly wealthy. It has an unbelievable team of lawyers at its disposal and is known for its nuisance lawsuits. That’s the reason for the masks.

  Anonymous signs all its videos and messages with the slogan “Knowledge is free. We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us!”

  Scientology was a powerful adversary. The sect had been able to muzzle a lot of people who wanted to reveal its secrets. Former members, in particular, who had broken with Scientology and wanted to warn others about the sect’s methods were flooded with lawsuits, harassed, and intimidated.

  With WikiLeaks, insiders had the chance to publish their information without the risk of Scientology figuring out who they were and suing them. The Julius Bär leaks had proven that there was nothing you could do to stop us.

  To start with, we concentrated on publishing the sect’s handbooks. We had penetrated the “system” bank. Now we were immersing ourselves in the “system” sect. I’d never paid much attention to Scientology before that. And I was riveted.

  As a Scientologist, one works, so to speak, one’s way up the career ladder, level by level, with the goal of becoming “clear.” Depending on how one performs, one achieves a certain “Thetan level” in the process. At each level, members are required to pay a hefty fee for the training they receive.

  Thetans are curious creatures. The story goes that millions of years ago our solar system, which consisted of seventy-six planets, was suffering from overpopulation. An intergalactic warrior named Xenu traveled throughout the galaxies on a mission to save the day. Like a mirror image of the biblical Noah, Xenu gathered up the scum of the universe’s population—above all, criminals and other dubious characters. He then had them killed here on Earth by putting them all inside a Hawaiian volcano and detonating a hydrogen bomb. What could be more logical!

  Ever since, Thetans have wandered the Earth as spirits in search of primitive people whose bodies they can attach themselves to in order to regain material form. If someone has a problem, it’s because of the Thetan still dwelling deep within him. That’s the basic teaching of Scientology, which claims to help people free themselves from their inner Thetans. The sect’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, claimed in radio broadcasts from the 1950s, which we also published, that he was several hundred million years old and that he was traveling the galaxy to observe things.

  Probably because it is felt that such nonsense would be too much for new members, the sect only imparts this information when members have reached a certain point on the career ladder. Before that, they are under no circumstances allowed to take even a peek at that part of the “holy scriptures.” Scientologists only learn as of level 5, for instance, that their world is populated by aliens.

  The handbooks are not only secret, they’re expensive. In order to be clued in about the existence of aliens, for example, a member usually has to have reached a level requiring a cumulative payment of fees to Scientology equivalent to the cost of a single-family home. In this perverse sense, the books that we published on our site were worth at least hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  According to Scientology, those who don’t overcome their Thetans quickly enough have to be “rehabilitated.” If someone is particularly unlucky, he lands in a so-called Rehabilitation Force Project (RFP). This is like a Scientology juvenile detention center. Scientology also runs a fleet of ships consisting of cruise liners. The sect’s private navy is called Sea Organization, or Sea Org for short. Anyone who fails to live up to expectations on these ships can be sent to the RFP unit. There a member may undergo a series of absurd punishments. For example, a member may be forced to wear a black rubber full-body suit and be isolated from the rest of the crew. He may be allowed to eat only after everyone else is through with their meals, and get only the scraps left behind by his fellow members. He’s not allowed to sleep for more than seven hours. He may not be allowed to move at a normal pace, but rather be forced to run around. In particularly bad cases, he would be forced to run around in circles on deck, no matter how hot it gets in the rubber suit.

  He may have to empty the latrines onboard or carry out likewise degrading tasks that other members can assign to him at any time. He may be allowed to resume other activities—for instance, his own spiritual development—once he has carried out his punitive assignments.

  In 1995, a young woman named Lisa McPherson died while under the sway of Scientology. Her death unleashed the first significant wave of outrage against the sect, which until then had been relatively unknown.

  The circumstances surrounding McPherson’s death have never been fully determined.
What’s known is that the thirty-six-year-old was brought to a hospital after suffering a nervous breakdown following a minor traffic accident. There she was picked up by two Scientologists who said they had documents proving they were responsible for McPherson’s well-being.

  The woman was subjected to a so-called Introspection Rundown in one of the rehabilitation units. We were the first people ever to publish the concrete procedures for this, as laid out by Scientology. According to those procedures, people undergoing an Introspection Rundown aren’t allowed to speak with anyone. Isolation is supposed to teach them to free themselves from their situation. But for a person suffering a psychological crisis, isolation can be fatal. This was the case with Lisa McPherson. The coroner also determined she had been given far too little to drink. Dehydration and being confined to bed led to a thrombosis that went undetected or untreated. McPherson died of a respiratory embolism. Her “rundown” ended in her death. Scientologists handed over her body, which was in very poor condition, to a hospital in Florida on December 5, 1995.

  The authorities subsequently began investigating Scientology leaders for failing to offer needed medical help and practicing medicine without a doctor’s license. But the charges were dropped when the medical examiner ultimately determined that her death was accidental. In 2004, in a civil trial, McPherson’s next of kin agreed to a settlement with Scientology. The deal remains undisclosed.

  Among other things, what made our Scientology leak so valuable was that it contained the precise procedure for a “rundown.” We also collected a number of internal audio and video recordings and published lists of companies and agencies that had connections to the Scientology network. On those lists were companies that ran hiring tests for other firms and for social-service organizations—among them, one responsible for combating drug addiction in the United States.

  The members of Anonymous were a great help to us in structuring this material. They organized and sorted the way we presented it on the Internet and provided a lot of useful information. I spoke to some of them on the telephone. I was always running to call shops in the middle of the night to phone American or British numbers. I would stand in a call box, leaning against the woodchip wall, surrounded by the comforting chatter in German of Arab, Indian, or African exiles, and listen to horror stories from the lives of ex-Scientologists. Sometimes these calls went into the wee hours of the morning.

  To stay awake, I’d buy a bottle of Club-Mate, a soft drink containing stimulants. I kept it beside the phone as I tried to calm down the unknown individual on the other end of the line. One of them said he feared for his life after leaving Sea Org. The next one wanted to know how he could get us video material. Others just wanted to talk. Actually, all of them wanted to talk. In particular, those ex-Scientologists who had only recently left the sect were usually at their wit’s end and were thankful that a young German took the time to listen to them. At least with me they had the impression that contacting someone wasn’t going to put them at risk. I was a pro when it came to questions of security.

  The call-shop employees were no doubt used to dubious-looking characters who wanted to make their calls with complete anonymity. But I was an especially frequent customer. I probably still have around a hundred SIM cards lying around at home, stored in film containers. Most practical for my purposes were the preregistered cards that are widely available under the counter. Sometimes, I’d buy a whole series of numbers, search the Web for the names and addresses of large families (birthday party announcements on blogs were a good source), and then register the cards to those people. There was no way anyone could tell who was calling whom.

  Transferring documents was also secure. We took care that controversial documents were sent through so many detours, encryptions, and anonymizing procedures, and were accompanied by such a large amount of white noise as a diversion, that no one could trace where they came from. We were likewise unable to contact our sources, even in cases when clarifications were urgently necessary. The sender left no traces on the Web, not even the smallest fingerprint or data fragment. Nothing.

  The informants did not have to fear any lawsuits. We, on the other hand, hoped that Scientology would try to sue us. The sect would almost surely have lost any suit it chose to file, and the case would have attracted more public interest in the spectacular documents, as had been the case with Julius Bär. At the time, there were monthly anti-Scientology protests in almost every major city. Members of Anonymous, for instance, had held up signs at one such protest saying SUE WL, YOU FAGGOTS!

  But the leaders of the sect were either cleverer than our adversaries at the bank or lucky enough to come after them. The case of Julius Bär had shown the whole world that one could only lose by suing us.

  Personally, I was most fascinated by the cult of personality surrounding Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard. In older recordings, he was shown or heard holding talks at universities in which he told his audience that he was millions of years old and was traveling from planet to planet to check that everything was OK. At first people laughed. But by the end of any given broadcast, you sensed that an almost friendly relationship had built up between Hubbard and the listeners in the auditorium. Hubbard had a special talent. He was a captivating storyteller, knew how to laugh at himself, and could serve up even the most absurd stories with a straight face.

  During this period, Julian and I used to joke about whether it would make sense for us to found a religion. It would have solved a lot of problems. If, for example, not enough people were reading the documents we thought were important, we could have sent out a team like the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They could have rung people’s doorbells and read our leaks out loud: “Are you aware of the paragraph about your local water utility—millions in corruption!” It is ironic that Facebook today includes a page for a religion called Assangism!

  The guys from Anonymous helped us present the Scientology leaks. They prepared the site so that readers could find their way more easily through the deluge of documents. They were all volunteers.

  We could have benefited from something similar for lots of other material, but in general it was hard to motivate outsiders to work with us. It was becoming increasingly clear that we were not going to be able to handle everything ourselves. New people were constantly getting in touch via the chat room and offering to help. But how could we know that they stood for the same ideals we did? And that they wouldn’t let important security information slip?

  An all-consuming religion would have simplified a lot of things. Those who worked for Scientology were highly motivated, despite the sometimes hair-raising conditions in which they lived and worked. Scientology took everything they had to give, and when their money ran out, people would mortgage their houses and sell off their belongings. Or they could do work for Scientology. In return, they received neither a pension nor a vacation—members sometimes even signed over their insurance policies to the sect.

  Looking back, I ask myself whether WikiLeaks itself has developed into a kind of religious cult. It’s become a system that admits little internal criticism. Anything that went wrong had to be the fault of something on the outside. The guru was beyond question. The danger had to be external. This mind-set encouraged internal cohesion. Anyone who offered too much criticism was punished by having his rights suspended or by being threatened with possible consequences. Moreover, WL participants were only allowed to know as much as was absolutely necessary for them to carry out their appointed tasks.

  In any case, this much can be said: From reading the Scientology documents, and the philosophy and teachings of L. Ron Hubbard, Julian learned only too well how a cult of personality functions.

  OUR work brought us in contact with cults, clandestine operations, judicial trickery, and marketing strategies, and we learned a lot from the people we were fighting against. Later, when it came to our own finances, Julian would try to avail himself of concealment tactics similar to those used by Julius Bär. Like Scientology, we di
dn’t want outsiders to be able to see our internal structures, and we encouraged a sense of mystery concerning who was who on our team. In late 2010, while being pursued by Swedish prosecutors, Julian would apply for asylum in Switzerland, the very country we had sought to nail for its banking secrecy laws and cowardly politicians.

  The next terrain in which we were forced to find our feet was the press landscape. From the media we tried to learn how to manipulate public opinion.

  At this point, we’d had some experience with the newspapers and broadcasters—and not all of it was good. One important lesson we learned was that in cases of crisis, it was better to divert people’s attention than to waste energy trying to deny one’s own shortcomings and mistakes or to argue them out of existence. The latter was far too time-consuming! At first, I would cheerfully provide information on every little mishap, but the public has a short memory. All that counted was the next story. When there was something new to write about, no one asked anymore about old problems.

  One day a journalist from a left-wing newspaper in Berlin asked whether our IT and legal system in Sweden really would stand up to a serious test. It, after all, was the basis of assurances of protection we gave to our sources. In fact, there was a chink in our security that we had overlooked. The journalist wasn’t the only one to suggest that our system was anything but impregnable.

  When I approached Julian, he didn’t want to hear anything about the problem.

  “The author is misinformed,” he snapped.

  Julian thought the majority of journalists were idiots. A short time later, he sent the following tweet: “The article currently being spun about WikiLeaks source protection is false.”