Inside WikiLeaks

by Daniel Domscheit-Berg

  In the taxi on my way to see the journalist Philip Banse in the Neukölln district of Berlin, I received a phone call from my mother. My grandmother had died. We had been expecting the news any day. I hadn’t even visited her one last time to say good-bye. I knew that my grandmother was proud of me and of my fight for a more just world. I felt ashamed that I hadn’t been prepared to cancel my radio appearance to say good-bye to her properly. The rest of the family had spent the whole week at her bedside. But I had an appointment in Berlin, and that was more important to me.

  At that point I felt like we had to take every opportunity to raise the profile of WikiLeaks. We were in desperate need of donations, and we were pleased when new documents were uploaded onto our site. Everything else came farther down on our list of priorities. Much farther down.

  The first time that something Julian said really left a bitter taste in my mouth was in early 2009, when we were considering taking part in the World Social Forum in Brazil. A friend had mentioned to me that he would like to come with us. I told Julian about it. Personally, I was against the idea. This friend had nothing to do with the project, and we weren’t going there on vacation, but rather to make contacts and to work. Not to mention the fact that I was paying for the tickets. Julian had no money.

  Julian, on the other hand, thought it was an excellent idea and said, “Let him come along. He can carry our suitcases.” When I looked incredulous, he said that he’d often done it in the past and that he liked having someone along to carry his bags. That was the first time I asked myself who was playing his porter right now. I couldn’t think of anyone. Besides me.

  I realized only later that Julian must have frequently interpreted my behavior as kowtowing. I just wanted to be friendly and considerate. I think that he must have regarded me as weaker than I actually was. Perhaps it’s because I am an optimistic person who spends less time criticizing and more time getting things done. And our friendship began to fall apart the moment that Julian no longer felt that I was kowtowing to him. When I began to bring up concrete problems or criticize him, simply because problems existed and not because I saw our relationship differently, he started to describe me as someone who needed to be “contained.”

  In early 2010 his tone toward me changed radically. “If you fuck up, I’ll hunt you down and kill you,” he once told me. No one had ever said anything like that to me. It was outrageous. No matter how frightened he was that something would go wrong, a threat like that was utterly inexcusable. I just asked whether he still had all his marbles, laughed, and left it at that. What are you supposed to say to such a statement?

  I can’t think of any serious mistakes for which I alone was responsible. Once I didn’t make a backup of the central server, and when it broke, Julian said, “WikiLeaks has only survived because I didn’t trust you.” Julian had a backup that we could use to reboot everything easily. No doubt, he hadn’t made the copy out of fastidiousness but just because he distrusted people, including me. It was the server on which all our e-mails were stored. He wasn’t a particularly careful person himself. Sometimes I thought when he talked to me, he was really talking about himself.

  The absurd thing was that he was the one who was continually losing or forgetting things. And that was precisely what he was accusing me of. If Julian messed something up, on the other hand, something else was always the reason. He always had an elaborate explanation, sometimes one that cast him as the hero. When, in June 2009, he was due to be presented with Amnesty International’s Media Award, he arrived in London three hours late. The leak for which the prize was awarded was about extra-judicial killings by the Kenyan police. Seventeen hundred people were murdered. Two human rights lawyers from a Kenyan legal-aid foundation had uncovered this and written a report on it. Not only did he miss the awards ceremony at which he was due to give a thank-you speech, but he also missed the interviews afterward that had been arranged. There were a lot of people in the audience we couldn’t reach any other way. We expected this award to open a lot of doors for us, and it would take the wind out of the sails of some of our critics. Something Amnesty regarded as worthy of an award couldn’t be that unethical. Two months before the award ceremony, Kamau Kingara, the director of the Kenyan foundation, and his program director, John Paul Oula, were gunned down in their car in Nairobi. The two of them were on their way to a Kenyan human rights commission, with which they had written their report.

  We had only put the report on our website, making it accessible to a wider audience. We owed it to Kingara and Oula to accept the award on their behalf. It was the least we could do. Julian wrote a solemn press release in which he once again stressed their civic courage.

  Julian’s excuse for showing up late at the award ceremony was long-winded. It could have taken up several pages of a spy thriller. The only detail I can remember is that two police officers had allegedly followed him.

  On another occasion, he explained that he had missed a connecting flight because he was busy solving an extremely difficult math problem. Although I spent a lot of time with him, I could never tell when he was trying to pull the wool over my eyes and when he was telling the truth.

  I know at least three different versions of his past and the origins of his surname. There were stories of him having at least ten ancestors from various corners of the globe, from the South Sea pirates to Irishmen. For a while, he even had business cards printed up with “Julian D’Assange” on them. He created a real sense of mystery about himself and constantly cloaked his past in new details. He was glad every time a journalist jotted them down. My first thought when I heard he was writing an autobiography was that they should put it in the fiction section!

  Julian reinvented himself every day, like a hard drive that one kept on reformatting. Reset, reboot. Maybe he didn’t know himself—who he was and where he came from. Maybe he had learned early on that he always had to cut himself free from women and friends, and this was easier if he could revise his personality and press the Reset button.

  Julian was engaged in a constant battle for dominance—even with my cat, Mr. Schmitt. Mr. Schmitt is a lovable, lazy creature, a bit shy, with gray-and-white fur and an extremely laid-back way of walking. Unfortunately he also has a neurosis stemming from the time when Julian lived with me in Wiesbaden.

  Julian was always attacking the poor animal. He would spread his fingers into a fork shape and pounce on the cat’s neck. It was a game to see who was quicker. Either Julian would succeed in getting his fingers around the cat and pinning it to the floor, or the cat would drive Julian off with a swipe of its claws.

  It must have been a nightmare for the poor thing. No sooner would Mr. Schmitt lie down to relax than the crazy Australian would be upon him. Julian preferred to attack at times when Mr. Schmitt was tired. “It’s about training vigilance,” Julian explained. Mr. Schmitt was a male cat, and male cats were supposed to be dominant. “A man must never forget he has to be the master of the situation,” Julian proclaimed. I wasn’t aware that anyone in my apartment or the courtyard had questioned Mr. Schmitt’s masculinity. What’s more, he was neutered.

  Julian constantly attracted trouble. When we were on our way back from the International Journalism Conference in Perugia, Italy, in April 2009, there was an argument with a train conductor that almost cost us our flight back to Germany. We were under a lot of time pressure that day because we had to make a connecting flight in Rome. One train was delayed—an overhead transmission line had gone on the fritz—and we had to rearrange our plans and pay for a new ticket and a supplement on top of it. I took care of everything. I was the one who spent the agonizing minutes at the ticket counter while Julian sat on a bench waiting and watching our luggage. We ended up running across the platform and only managed to catch our new train at the very last minute because I had called out to the train staff from the escalators, “Don’t leave; please wait!”

  Our pulses racing, sweating profusely, we only just caught the train that the people in the st
ation had told us was our final chance. It was in fact the very last train. We headed for two window seats, set down our backpacks on the free seats next to us, and stretched out our legs with a sigh.

  A monster appeared: a badly shaved, slightly chubby Italian, who was working his way through the rows to our seats. The ticket inspector. Frowning, he examined our tickets and then thrust them back into our hands.

  In bad English the Italian said that he was very sorry but we had obviously bought the wrong tickets. Nonetheless—abracadabra!—he said he could fix our problem for a small surcharge. I would have given in. But Julian completely lost it. He refused to pay the additional ten or fifteen euros and looked at the inspector with profound contempt.

  The inspector definitely wasn’t a particularly helpful person. He was simply a bad-tempered man in his midfifties who was doing his job and wanted to get back, as quickly as possible, to a card game with his colleagues, or whatever else awaited him in the ticket inspectors’ compartment. We could have spent ages discussing why, through no fault of our own, we were being asked to pay up yet again and telling him what we thought more generally of his native land and its Mafia structures.

  But we needed to get to Rome as quickly as possible in order to catch the cheap flight I had booked. Under the circumstances, I would have gladly paid the ridiculous surcharge and relaxed. However, Julian caused such a stir that the ticket inspector summoned the carabinieri at the next station. I was embarrassed—not least because there was someone sitting to our right who had also been at the conference in Perugia. Julian wasn’t bothered about having an audience. It was almost as if he enjoyed putting on a small private theater performance.

  We were now surrounded by the gruff inspector and two young police officers. “Your documents, please,” demanded the female officer, who couldn’t have been more than twenty years old but looked just as surly as the other two. I rummaged around in my pockets. Julian protested loudly, “We aren’t going to show anyone here our documents.”

  I handed the woman my ID card. Julian crossed his arms and snorted contemptuously.

  The three Italians looked at one another indecisively. They would have liked to have thrown Julian off the train, but none of them wanted to make the first move. The young Australian was still sitting stretched out comfortably on his seat. They would have had to grab him by the arm and pull him out of his chair.

  Julian was of the opinion that the inspector needed to be taught a lesson. That was one of his favorite sayings: “The man in the uniform has to learn his lesson.”

  He said that he wasn’t tolerating anyone calling his authority into question and treating him without respect. Respect, respect, respect … he was always talking about respect. In this case, it was particularly pointless because the Italians probably didn’t even understand the word. And Julian didn’t respect anyone himself. It was getting on my nerves. I wanted to solve the problem. I didn’t want to pay 700 euros for two new flights. I took advantage of the stalemate situation that had developed among the five of us. I gave the ticket inspector the money and steeled myself to put up with Julian’s bad mood and preaching for the rest of the journey.

  My will to make WikiLeaks an intrinsic part of my life was greater than my fear of being pushed around.

  In 2009, when I appeared in a video interview for Zeit Online about the personal motives for my commitment to WikiLeaks, he accused me of being a media whore.

  “Too much personality” was his reproach.

  Julian told me we were too busy to have the time for lengthy interviews. After the Zeit Online video portrait, I tried to become less conspicuous. But this wasn’t easy.

  At the journalists’ conference in Perugia, I had done a story with Wired magazine and a young freelance journalist, Annabel Symington.

  Julian kept on throwing me dirty looks the whole time I was being interviewed. He said that he had heard me telling her that I was one of the “founders” of WikiLeaks. It was immensely important to him to keep stressing that he was the sole founder. I never said anything to the contrary. The competitiveness that lay behind all this was anathema to me. Even if I had experienced twinges of such feelings, I had suppressed them and been ashamed of myself.

  Julian would later accuse me of playing power games. He was wrong. I didn’t have a problem giving up power when it served our cause. On the contrary, I thought: Why should I burden myself with tons of responsibility when things functioned much better by sharing it? I’m a team player, not a loner like Julian. I can accept that other people do some things better than I do. In fact, there are a lot of them.

  SUCCESSFUL leaks that had attracted a lot of media coverage made themselves directly felt in our accounts. By 2008, we had three different PayPal accounts that people could use to make donations. For example, on March 1, 2008, as the leak appeared about Julius Bär, we had 1,900 euros in our main PayPal account. By March 3, that had already risen to 3,700, and by March 11, we had 5,000 euros.

  Then, in June 2009, our only remaining active PayPal account was frozen. Money could still be paid into it, but we couldn’t get any out.

  We hadn’t paid any attention to the account for months. It was only when PayPal informed us that we would no longer be able to withdraw money that we took a look at what had been paid in.

  “You won’t believe it,” I wrote Julian in August 2009. “There are almost thirty-five thousand dollars in the account.”

  I was determined to unfreeze the account. Julian didn’t think this was a priority and didn’t see why we should bother with it.

  PayPal wanted us to supply them with a certain document. We were registered as a nonprofit organization, but we had never officially applied for that status and were not qualified as a 501(c)(3) organization under US tax laws. Googling the term revealed that we weren’t the first nonprofit organization to face this problem. PayPal regularly pestered its clients for this document. We registered as a business. That cost fees, but it saved a lot of time and energy. Even changing a comma in a PayPal contract is more trouble than it’s worth. Life is too short.

  I must have called the hotline thirty times and sent lots of e-mails back and forth. At a certain point I realized that PayPal wasn’t a company with real flesh-and-blood employees. It was a machine. Admittedly, if you waited long enough on the hotline, you would end up speaking to real people at some point. But the Indian subcontractors, or whoever did these jobs for PayPal, could only tell you that you should please use the online system.

  I think that PayPal’s staff were just as much at the mercy of their own software as their clients. And this machinery neither knew pity nor recognized exceptional circumstances. The art of filling out the right fields remained a kind of arcane knowledge I would never be initiated into.

  The system unfroze our assets briefly after we had turned the account into a business one and agreed to pay fees. For twenty-four hours, to be precise. Then the whole nonsense started again from the beginning. Once more a piece of information was missing. Once more it wasn’t clear where this information had to be sent. Once more I got nowhere with the online system.

  The dispute also created another problem. We weren’t the only ones affected. All our accounts were maintained by volunteer supporters. For instance, a journalist had registered the frozen PayPal account for us. The contact person was a man in his late fifties from the Midwest in the United States—a down-to-earth guy who worked as a reporter for a local newspaper. At some point in the year, he had contacted us and asked if he could do anything to help. Because he hadn’t suggested handling our finances, we gave him the job with the account. That was our logic at the time. Whoever wasn’t interested in accounts was the best person to manage them. Whoever wasn’t interested in personally influencing public opinion managed our chat room, and so on.

  Our volunteer had no idea what to do, or where exactly the problem lay. It was all too much for him.

  In September 2009, Julian got the “nanny” involved. The nanny was brough
t in whenever there was a job that Julian couldn’t be bothered with or couldn’t do himself. She sometimes arrived just before conferences to write his speeches. After other people and I left WikiLeaks, she was also the one who ended up traveling the world mediating between Julian and us and asking us not to damage the project by publicly criticizing it.

  The nanny was an old friend of Julian’s and was around forty—a pleasant but very resolute sort of person. For personal reasons I don’t want to go into here, she would never want to talk about her contact with WL. That was likely a particular advantage she offered from Julian’s perspective.

  At any rate, the nanny had our American volunteer at his wit’s end. What made the matter worse was that the time zones in which the two of them lived were so far apart that communication was only possible for one during the potential deep-sleep phase of the other. In addition, our poor volunteer was sick of describing the whole problem over again. In the end a journalist I knew from the New York Times came to the rescue. In the third week of September she went through official channels, getting in touch with PayPal directly and asking them why a project being supported by the New York Times had been frozen. Abracadabra! The account was released.

  Things really turned nasty at that point. All of a sudden we had a bundle of money. But Julian and I had very different ideas about what to do with it.

  I wanted to buy hardware—and not just because I really knew my way around that area. I wanted to get our infrastructure up to speed. This was desperately needed. As a result, breakdowns and security risks were inevitable. It made it far too easy for our adversaries. As long as everything was run on a single server, it would have been easy to break into WikiLeaks. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but our documents were also on the server.

  Julian had other plans, a lot more ostentatious plans. He talked about creating companies to better protect our donations from outside intervention. He said that it would set us back $15,000 in lawyers’ fees just to register the companies in the United States.