Inside WikiLeaks

by Daniel Domscheit-Berg

  Julian also had connections to some organizations that wanted to act as “fiscal sponsors.” They were nonprofit organizations to which American donors could transfer money in order to avoid taxes. I don’t know whose company Julian was keeping at the time, what kind of films he was watching, or more significantly, which documents on our site he had been reading a bit too closely, but suddenly all he could talk about was “front companies,” “international law,” and “offshore” firms. I imagined him sitting in front of me with his encrypted cell phone, his hands nonchalantly on his hips, his long white hair slicked back with gel, saying, “Hello, Tokyo, New York, Honolulu? Please transfer three million to the Virgin Islands. Yes, thanks a lot. And don’t forget to destroy the documents after the transaction has been completed. Burn them, please. And wipe up the ash and swallow it. OK? You know that I can’t stand leftovers.…”

  Whatever scenes Julian was playing out in his imagination, they fit his dream of an untouchable organization, an international network of firms, and the aura of someone invulnerable who juggled finances and firms all over the world and whom no one in the world could stop. Nonetheless, while it may not have been sexy, we could have used a few simple, practical things first of all.

  My girlfriend at the time had bought us secure cell phones, or Cryptophones, as they’re called. She shelled out an awful lot of money in one fell swoop. And I still feel bad now, when I think about how I slowly let our relationship die.

  Months later, when we were in Iceland, I accidentally found out that Julian was trying to sell one of those astronomically expensive cell phones to one of our acquaintances—for 1,200 euros. Not only didn’t the cell phones belong to him, but he wanted to sell one off at a hugely inflated price to someone who had no money for that kind of thing. Afterward, Julian gave away the cell phone to some seventeen-year-old guy he wanted to become more involved. Julian could be unself-consciously generous one minute, then really miserly a minute later.

  In April 2008 we had opened an account with the UK-based money-transfer company Moneybookers. It was primarily intended to enable donors in the United States to transfer their money to us online. No one knew how much money was deposited in the Moneybookers account and what it was used for. Julian refused to allow me or other colleagues who joined later any access to the account.

  Julian later opened another Moneybookers account in his own name. There was a direct link from our donation page to it. He refused to say what the account was for. It was closed in the fall of 2010, and later Julian publicly complained that WikiLeaks had had its money taken away. There is an e-mail Moneybookers sent to WikiLeaks on August 13, 2010, which was later quoted by the Guardian newspaper. According to it, the account was closed after examination by the security department at Moneybookers in order “to comply with money laundering and other investigations being carried out by government agencies.” The account was indeed shut down. But every single cent had been withdrawn beforehand.

  Ironically, Julian didn’t really care about money per se. He never carried any on him, always letting other people pay. He justified this practice by saying that he didn’t want anyone to trace his whereabouts from his ATM visits. Sometimes he would tell our helpers this—an hour after giving a press conference that had beamed his current location all around the world. They may well have swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Women, in particular, liked to help Julian. They bought all sorts of things for him: clothes, rechargers, cell phones, coffee, flights, chocolate, new luggage, woolen socks.

  Julian didn’t give a hoot about status symbols. He may be different today, but back then, when we traveled together, he didn’t own a watch, a car, or any designer clothing. He just didn’t care. Even his computer was ancient: a white iBook that was almost a museum piece. At the most, he would buy himself a new USB stick.

  In addition to the donor accounts, we also considered other ways of raising money. One idea was to get paid for the leaked documents directly by auctioning off exclusive access to the material. A kind of eBay for WikiLeaks, you could say. In September 2008 we released a trial balloon. We announced on our website and in press releases that we were going to sell off to the highest bidder e-mails from Freddy Balzan, the speechwriter of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. The announcement got lots of media coverage in Latin America. That was not, however, because of the number of media organizations competing with one another to express interest in the documents. Instead, attention immediately shifted to our plan itself, and a critical debate ensued. We were accused of wanting to capitalize on the work of our sources. And there were complaints that only media organizations with money would be able to exploit this interesting material first. We just wanted to test the waters. In actual fact we didn’t have the technical capacity to stage an auction of that kind at the time.

  I tried to apply for money from the Knight Foundation. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, based in the United States, promotes exceptional journalistic projects. In 2009 alone, the foundation handed out more than $105 million. At the end of 2008 I submitted our first funding application, for $2 million. It got turned down in the third or fourth round of the multistage application procedure. When we received the news that we had made it into the second round, Julian announced that the $2 million grant was as good as in the bag. Well, not quite.

  I tried again in 2009, submitting an application for half a million dollars. This application was very time-consuming, and Julian didn’t help me. I spent two weeks working on the application with a volunteer. I had to answer eight questions about the motivation and inner structure of the project. One day before the deadline for submissions, Julian turned up with the nanny in tow.

  The plan had been for the nanny to write the application on the eve of the deadline, but I had long since completed it. So we decided that we would make two applications. One was bound to be successful, or so the thinking went. Julian and the nanny tried to convince me that theirs would be the successful application. It was rejected in the first round. Mine got further, proceeding from round one to round two. Then, all of a sudden, we were in the penultimate round.

  Later Julian would complain that I had tried to smuggle my name onto the application. That was a brazen reversal of the facts. Back in 2008, I had sat on the last day with the completed forms on my desk, wondering what to do about the signature. It was a real headache. We had to supply a real address, a real name, a permanent abode, and so on.… We didn’t have an office that I could have used as an address. And Julian didn’t have a fixed address anyway.

  Time was running out, so I thought, Who cares about the United States? It really doesn’t matter if I use my real name. I signed the application and sent it off. And in 2009 I did the same thing. I spent the next few days dreaming that WikiLeaks had been awarded the half million dollars and dreaming about all the things that we could afford with it. Just before going to sleep I thought about how we could set up the most sophisticated security equipment—only the best: half a rack in a properly air-conditioned data center, with an electric generator and a network as well as a terminal server for accessing other servers if there was a problem. And the servers would be from the most recent generation, not from two generations past.

  I carried on dreaming. Of renting an office and entrusting people with specific tasks. Of paying ourselves salaries. I would have preferred never to return to the company I worked for, with its Excel sheets, Tuesday meetings, and my secret telephone conferences in the storeroom on the eighth floor.

  The application procedure went on for weeks. The Knight Foundation asked for additional paperwork and wanted to invite us to the last round at MIT in Boston. They wanted to meet us personally and put questions to our “board.”

  The advisory board was a daring construction that had been set up before my time. Only one of the eight people listed as belonging to our advisory board publicly acknowledged a link to us—that was C J Hinke, a Net activist from Thailand. Journalists dug up every single one of the ostensibl
e board members over time. The Chinese ones immediately denied any connection. Julian dismissed this with the words “Of course, they can’t publicly acknowledge their link to us.” Ben Laurie denied on several occasions ever having played an advisory role. Phillip Adams at least said that he had agreed on some occasion but had not been able to contribute to the project for health reasons.

  The foundation would no doubt have found it useful to have met with the inner circle of WikiLeaks on at least one occasion, but it was impossible to find a time that suited us all. The e-mails went back and forth for ages. The foundation must have thought that we were either completely arrogant or extremely disorganized. Both were true. That’s why I put myself at their disposal. I wanted to give our contacts the feeling that we had things under control. Julian wrote me an angry e-mail afterward: “You’re not the applicant.”

  Later he told the others that I had tried to force my way onto the application. My God! We could have put our energy to better use by combining forces to put together a great presentation. The application failed to clear the final hurdle.

  TO me, it was quite clear that our aim was to earn a living from WikiLeaks one day. It would mean that no one would need to turn tricks on the side. That was a constant problem. We needed a lot more people. And we needed a lot more time. But we lacked both because almost all of us had to earn money outside WikiLeaks.

  In my eyes, not being able to do the work that you knew was more meaningful was a kind of prostitution. Of course, I know I’m not the only one in the world unable to do what he loves most.

  There was only one person who received money for his services directly from WikiLeaks, a technician who is still with the project. Perhaps he’s stayed on out of a sense of obligation because of that money. And once we paid a journalist about 600 euros for writing us an extensive analysis about the bank leaks. We thought at the time that we should have engaged someone specifically to carry out much more probing research. Back in 2008, 600 euros was a lot of money for us.

  Increasingly, my job was getting on my nerves. Investing my energies on behalf of my clients was leading me nowhere. What was the point of Opel producing more cars, or another of my customers boosting his turnover? That didn’t make the world a better place. I felt that people with certain qualifications also had a responsibility to invest them for the good of society. Every minute I spent in the office seemed like a waste of time. I concentrated on doing my work as efficiently as possible. That wasn’t a problem in a big company in which project phases were generously calculated, particularly when you work more quickly than most of the others.

  I worked for WikiLeaks at night and for the company during the day, increasingly from home. Sometimes the telephone would wake me at eleven a.m. with an important customer on the line. I had invariably forgotten that I had an appointment for a telephone conference. Wearing just my underwear and old socks, and having just been torn from a deep sleep, I would stumble over a package of secret military documents spread out over the floor and plop down onto my beanbag chair. And then I would explain to top managers of leading international companies what a brilliant job we could do optimizing their data centers. Afterward I would return to the documents, the secret-service papers and the corruption cases due to be published next on the website. The quality of my work remained impeccable. My parents had raised me to be conscientious, and that’s something that sticks with you.

  In mid-2008 I was in Moscow for my employer for four weeks. My job was meant to be installing a data center in an office building. When I got there, it became apparent that the whole business was going horribly wrong.

  I stayed on the northeastern outskirts of the city in a Holiday Inn by Sokolniki Park, and it took forty-five minutes on the subway every day to get to where I was working. Because I was the only non-Russian—that is, the only one there who could be trusted—I quickly got charged with doing all sorts of things. The customer called me every day. I was working round the clock, and was forever trying to protect hardware worth almost a million dollars from dust. Either a workman would be sandpapering the walls in front of the server room, or an air-conditioning unit in the ceiling would be leaking.

  The building site was a nightmare. The poorly paid workmen simply hid the rubble and the garbage in the cavity between the floor and the ceiling of the unit below, and the heating pipes had sprung their first leaks even before they were finished, because people had been walking around too much on top of them. I had developed blood blisters on my feet. I managed to wear out a pair of Doc Martens in Moscow. The city was a real pain in the ass.

  Once, I took a short break to experience another side of the city. I went to see my former exchange partner, with whom I had lived when I visited Russia in the twelfth grade. Vladimir* had studied law. When I asked him what exactly his current job involved, he said “doing people favors.” He had four girlfriends and had bought each of them a car and an apartment. What impressed me most was the letter he had in his car from the police chief saying, for all intents and purposes, “Please leave this man alone.”

  I’m not usually a nervous passenger. But I clung to the handle above the window as Vladimir jerked his car into the right-turn lane at a hundred kilometers per hour, or when he created a lane of his own, firmly convinced that everyone else would make way for him and knowing that he would win the traffic case if it ever came to court.

  From my office window, I could see several huge building sites. Moldavian workers were constructing some record-breaking buildings. Meanwhile, to my left was the highest building in Europe; to my right, the second-highest tower in the world, if I remember correctly. The laborers lived in small container cities—the Russian version of townships—that were fenced off with barbed wire. More than fifty laborers died in accidents on one building site since the beginning of the construction works. It’s a disgrace that we didn’t publish a single document about the conditions in Russia in all those years. One of the reasons was that we received so little material, and then there was the language barrier. Neither Julian nor I nor anyone from the inner circle could understand Russian. You can say what you like about many people’s number-one enemy, the United States, but in Moscow the situation was also acute. I would have loved to have had more time for WikiLeaks during those weeks. I did at least manage to meet with Transparency International in Moscow and to give an interview at the German public television station ARD’s Moscow studio.

  The first wave of firings at my employer started taking place at that time. Our labor-advisory committee sent around an e-mail, offering staff the chance to get some advice. A short time later, we received an e-mail from management, warning us not to count the quarter of an hour we spent with the committee as part of our official working day. We were constantly being bombarded with petty-minded nonsense and preachy bullshit—for example, reminders that Christmas Eve was also half a working day, or that pens and erasers were company property.

  I was furious. I was working sixteen to eighteen hours a day, and the company was insinuating that we were trying to cheat them out of fifteen minutes of paid work. So I wrote an e-mail and sent it to all the company’s German staff. As sender, I entered the address of the management, and I cc’d all our bosses. In the e-mail I asked the managing director not to assume that others shared his own work ethic. I added that it would also be nice if the advisory committee could show a bit of backbone. I sent the e-mail via a network printer. I knew its IP address because it was the printer in the hall outside my office in Rüsselsheim.

  It didn’t take long before a chat box opened on my computer. A colleague who was part of management’s inner circle had sent me an agitated inquiry. She told me that they had a problem and asked whether I could briefly help, as I knew a lot about security and that kind of thing. I pretended to be amazed.

  “Unbelievable!” I wrote.

  I investigated the case thoroughly and reminded her that I had already pointed out the security problems linked to network printers on a number of oc
casions.

  “Isn’t it possible to find out who sent the e-mail?” she wanted to know.

  “Unfortunately not,” I wrote. “I also have an awful lot to do here. Sorry.”

  I signed off cordially and returned my attention to the Russian building site again.

  Some of my colleagues back home soon developed a blind hatred toward whoever had sent that e-mail. They were worried that they might be fingered for it and were sure they would get fired any day. In particular, people who were always complaining about management were suddenly shitting their pants.

  It was very amusing to see just how amateurishly the subsequent police investigation about my e-mail proceeded. In their attempt to track down the culprit, the police sealed everything off and dusted for fingerprints on all the printers and photocopiers. They removed the hard drives from all the nearby computers and took them in for forensic examination. Of course, nothing ever came of it.

  In early 2009 I decided to resign once and for all. Normally, I wouldn’t have been a candidate for layoffs, but because I had come forward of my own free will and I was young and single, the company could hardly say no. I managed to negotiate a year’s pay as a severance package. On January 31, 2009, I left for good. Finally I could devote my entire energy round the clock to WikiLeaks. The first thing I did with my severance money was to buy us six new laptops and a few new telephones. At first, my parents just couldn’t understand why I had given notice. To them it sounded very risky to be relinquishing a safe job, a pension, and all that. Nonetheless, fundamentally, they’ve always supported whatever I have done. My mother, in particular, had long since realized that I wanted to do something that I believed would benefit society, and it was clear to her that any attempts to stop me would only be counterproductive.