Inside WikiLeaks

by Daniel Domscheit-Berg

  We had a lot of crazy ideas like this. One was buying a boat, preferably one capable of laying cable on the seabed, and traveling the world in a floating office. Another was getting money together for a tour bus and cruising through Europe in the first-ever bookmobile for secret documents.

  Without our noticing, four weeks had passed. We weren’t making progress with the IMMI, and the question was what were we doing there? I asked it. And that didn’t make me very popular.

  “What about WL?” I wanted to know. We’d already abandoned our work for a month. Our submission platform was filling up with new documents that had to be reviewed and prepared for publication. “When are we going to continue?” I asked.

  I had seen our task as being to get the legislation going. Now it could take care of itself. There were Icelanders, after all, who were looking after that.

  “Why isn’t that enough?” I asked.

  But Julian couldn’t, or didn’t, want to let it go. He considered the IMMI his baby. Later, he made undiplomatic statements that damaged the whole project politically.

  None of us were simple people. And as the pressure mounted, our personal relationships showed the first cracks, especially the relationship between Julian and me. The others were more like film extras helplessly watching our fights. Toward the end of our weeks in Iceland, Julian accused me of losing perspective, of getting distracted by the minor details and losing sight of the bigger picture. I can’t remember any one decisive incident. Nor can I recall what prompted our first major quarrels. Probably it was banalities like open windows.

  I began to criticize Julian’s appearance. For example, I told him he should generally pay more attention to how he looked. He was very insulted. But do you have to meet with the Minister of Justice looking like a bum?

  We also had a very unpleasant discussion about who was senior and who was junior in our ranks. Julian set up a pecking order of who was allowed to criticize whom, with himself at the apex of the pyramid. That was justified by his intelligence and experience. But because at the time he was somewhat closer to Birgitta, he also decreed that not only he, but she as well, was exempt from my criticism. The latter, he said, was tantamount to criticizing him.

  At one point, he said he needed to have a word. Birgitta, he informed me, was getting completely irritated with me. Later I asked her about this, and she just laughed, saying there was nothing to it.

  “Everyone here thinks you’re being unbearable,” he said.

  “Who’s everyone?” I asked.

  “Everyone,” he said. “Anyone who has to deal with you.”

  Julian apparently didn’t like us sharing thoughts among ourselves. He said that if we started discussing things on our own, the truth would become “asymmetrical.” In Iceland, he was in danger of not being able to keep track of everything as he could in the chat room. He was worried that the others might go out for a coffee and simply start talking.

  • • •

  In no time, the Fosshotel apartment looked like an asylum for psychotic slobs. At the start, the cleaning women had still been able to plow a path with their large black vacuum cleaners through our things, but soon they couldn’t even get the tools of their trade through the door. For a few days, these friendly Icelandic ladies battled to save apartment number 23. But after five days at the most, they surrendered the terrain as lost. We agreed to an armistice and began swapping shopping bags full of trash for fresh towels and toilet paper.

  None of us cooked or even bought anything sensible to eat. Half-empty bags of potato chips began to collect amid our dirty laundry. A pile of stinky dried fish that someone had bought but no one thought was edible lay rotting away on some surface. Things were getting worse by the hour. We should have patented the smell of old socks, pizza crusts, dried fish, and sulfur as a means of torture.

  I need at least a modicum of orderliness, the faintest hope of keeping an overview. I can’t concentrate with total chaos around me. I could drink as much orange juice as I wanted from the bottles with their bright sunny faces, but at some point, my head began to spin, and twenty laps in the outdoor pool wasn’t going to make it stop.

  The apartment was way too small for us, especially since Julian was always occupying himself with one woman after another.

  One night I really needed to sleep. I was dead tired, and I asked him to just let me crash in peace for once. A short time later, I heard Julian talking to a woman on the phone. He laughed into the mouthpiece, and I could tell she had just said that they could meet at her place. I sighed to myself. But Julian insisted she come to the hotel. My problem was that we shared not only a room but a large double bed. I buried my head in my pillow and tried to sleep, or at least give that impression.

  There were also fights because he constantly made others wait. Coordinating a large group of fairly anarchic people is difficult enough as it is, requiring a positive desire for organization. But no matter whether we had an appointment or just wanted to go get something to eat, everyone else would usually be standing in the doorway, ready to roll, while Julian had to be asked for the umpteenth time to tear himself away from his laptop. I was the only one who had a serious word about this with him and who got irritated if he kept typing. The others preferred to wait stoically until he got himself together.

  I was in bad shape. The stress, the worries, and the aggravation had shredded my nerves, and I could no longer calm down, even for a moment. Iceland was a lovely place. Later, I returned there with my family for a vacation. But something in the apartment, in the air, in the sulfuric water, in the lack of sunlight, in the chaos, and in Julian’s bossy manner was making me sick.

  Before I completely lost my shit, I booked a flight home on February 5.

  “I’m taking off the day after tomorrow,” I told him. “I can’t stand it anymore.”

  We weren’t parting on friendly terms.

  It would be the last time we would ever see each other in person. Our communication was once again restricted exclusively to the chat room.

  I TOOK the subway directly from the airport into the middle of Berlin and parked myself on a couch at the Chaos Computer Club. I often spent the night there when I was in the German capital.

  I was feeling pretty down. Perhaps if I had known that a few hours later I would meet the woman who was to become my wife, it would have cheered me up. The nice thing about my life is that misery and joy often come in quick succession. But without that bit of advance knowledge, I shuffled my way through the club building, totally dejected. It wasn’t much sunnier in Germany than in Iceland, and when others asked me how things had gone in Iceland with the IMMI, I waved them off. “I’m too tired,” I said. They left me alone. Thankfully, despite the solidarity that club members feel for one another, the chance that they would pester you and ask you tons of questions was relatively small.

  I took a walk in search of some food. Although I rarely smoke pot, I rolled myself a joint and tried to relax. Almost accidentally, I arrived at Dada Falafel, a trendy, fast-food kiosk on one of Berlin’s most popular tourist streets. Even more accidentally, I met someone I knew there, in the company of a woman.

  My friend introduced us. “This is Daniel, Mr. WikiLeaks in Germany.” He pointed to me. “And this is Anke. She works for Microsoft.” He pointed to the woman who would become my wife and added, “She’s really nice.”

  I bit into my falafel and took stock of Anke through coleslaw and hummus. Cool woman. Fashionably dressed but with a style of her own. Very confident. With a good sense of humor.

  We ended up talking the entire evening while everything around us faded into the background and our food grew cold and then congealed on our plates. At some point, someone cleared the table. They could have replaced the entire interior, set off fireworks under our feet, or handed out hundred-dollar bills, and we still wouldn’t have noticed. We were completely lost in our conversation.

  Back then Anke had barely heard of WikiLeaks. She knew next to nothing about Julian and m
e. She worked for Microsoft on open government projects. In principle, she was trying to increase transparency from the top down, while we were working from the bottom up. I thought she was probably very good at her job.

  Anke was constantly on Twitter, describing everything that happened to her. That very evening, she tweeted that she had met “one of the WL founders” in Dada Falafel, and that we’d had a very interesting talk.

  Around one-thirty in the morning, I returned to the club. My head was buzzing with thoughts, some about the past, others about the future. I stayed awake for a long time, and it was a nice feeling to get into my sleeping bag. It was my sleeping bag and my sofa. At long last I was alone again at night. And for the first time in quite a while, I was thinking about a woman. I wondered whether Anke liked me. Bizarre. I couldn’t help shaking my head. Where had my bad mood gone? I nestled into my pillows and dozed off. I bet I was smiling as I slept.

  From that point on, I met up with Anke almost every day and quickly recovered from the cabin fever of Reykjavík. So I was in high spirits when I got back in touch with Julian for the first time in four days. I told him what a find Anke was. His first reaction was “Make sure you dig up some dirt on her.” I’d need it later, he said, when things went belly-up between us. Then I’d have something on her that I could use. I was dumbfounded. But Anke just laughed when I showed her the chat.

  “Hey, I’m sorry things were so difficult with me the past few days,” I wrote back. I’ve never had a problem apologizing, and this time it was even easier than usual. Back in Berlin, I could see that I had in fact come off the rails a bit in Iceland. When I pictured myself in the hallway of the Fosshotel, nervously tapping my foot and feeling like I was going to explode just because Julian had again made us wait for five minutes, the Daniel in Iceland seemed like my evil twin. An intolerable bundle of nerves. Realizing this actually calmed me down. It would have been far worse if all of Julian’s accusations had been completely invented.

  I desperately wanted everything to be right. I didn’t think at the time that his judgment about me would be permanent.

  I asked him what he blamed me for, what had gone wrong, and why he suddenly no longer wanted to work with me. He only gave one-sentence answers.

  “We can’t go into that now,” he wrote.

  “Later?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” he wrote.

  If there’s one thing in this world that’s dead certain to unleash a bout of rage in Julian, it’s when he reads in an article that “Daniel Schmitt” is a cofounder of WikiLeaks. “Founder”—the word was like showing red to a bull. He was always afraid that I would claim that title. Ever since WL really began to take off and attract money, attention, and even celebrity, he apparently felt as if he—the person who had conceived, nurtured, and defended everything—was having to share his fame with some vagabond con man from Wiesbaden.

  I knew the feeling of not having my own performance and ideas sufficiently recognized, and I tried to understand Julian’s concerns. But the more I thought about it, the less I could.

  In fact I had been well trained always to mention in conversations with journalists that I was an early participant in, but not a founder of, WikiLeaks. I’d bring it up even when no one asked me. Sometimes before I had even taken a seat. Even now, months later, I ask journalists just to make sure whether I ever claimed to be a founder of WL. I always said I “got in early and stuck around.”

  When I told Julian about Anke, he immediately asked if she was the one who had met the “WL founder.” The idea that I was using his WL to get women must have kept him awake at night. He probably imagined me hogging the conversation at the kiosk, surrounded by ten supermodels to whom I related one boastful WL story after another and who ultimately threw themselves at my feet.

  Anyway, in my opinion, no one cared as much about who was a “founder” as the founder himself. Most journalists weren’t interested in the topic at all. I could have told them I was Deputy Press Spokesman for Special Questions: Germany and Central Europe—they had to write something.

  Julian even told me that my friends at the computer club were whispering about me. It got to the point where I didn’t even invite some of them to my wedding. Julian said that people there had advised him to get rid of me because my work with the press in Germany was so lousy. Or that I held people back from getting involved with WL because they didn’t identify with me and my anarchic view of the world. I was very sensitive on this score.

  Julian accused me of being most afraid that someone from the club would take away my job. That was a misapprehension. What actually bothered me most was that someone might be maneuvering behind my back, not the desire to remain the WL spokesman at all costs and some fear of competition. It would have really disturbed me if the solidarity within the club had disintegrated. Suddenly I was forced to ask myself how well I knew the others.

  For a long time, I hadn’t been a Chaos Computer Club member and hadn’t paid any dues, but I had tried to show my gratitude in other ways. I procured hardware, helped out at events, and assisted in setting them up. I was never much for club board meetings and stuff like that. Nonetheless, I felt a bit guilty toward the club because I’d slept so often on their red sofa when I was in Berlin. I asked others how they saw things. They said, “You’ve been part of the club for a long while now.” That was a great honor. It was almost as if I’d been knighted.

  The club had already been through its fair share of hassles, and I wasn’t the first one who had attracted a bit of attention for what it did. A lot of club members before me have achieved far more than I have, and one person’s success can always lead to jealousy among others. That happens in the best associations. But the club had managed to survive any personal conflicts and remain intact. One important factor, I think, is that no one there is truly jealous or resentful of anyone else’s success. The only reaction is curiosity. People ask if they can help. On the other hand, everyone basically sticks to his own business. It took months for me to contact the people Julian claimed had been talking behind my back and ask them if we could clear up any problems.

  A further bit of nonsense of this kind was that I was on the verge of being recruited by a state intelligence service. People like me, who are under a lot of stress, can easily fall victim to offers of that nature. The only thing is, I’ve never received one. I ask myself which secret service would have been interested in me and what sort of tip-top job they were supposed to have offered. Canteen cook? Archivist for secret documents? The conspiracy theories sounded like they had been taken from a bad secret-agent novel.

  Shortly after I flew back to Germany from Iceland, Julian began attacking the Icelandic political system and the Ministry of Justice in particular, even though we were supposed to be working with them to make the IMMI legally airtight.

  The Twitter account had originally been conceived as a neutral channel for us to inform our followers about news and fresh articles about WL. We also alerted readers to articles critical of us, in keeping with our basic philosophy. But the account quickly developed into a channel for whatever Julian Assange happened to be thinking at any given moment. At some point, he began talking about “his followers” and “his account.” Under no circumstances was anyone permitted to criticize his tweets. One minute he would insult some journalists, calling them total idiots; another he would tell a mailing list of 350,000 people he had no time for interviews.

  One time, he issued a tweet attacking a journalist who worked for the American investigative magazine Mother Jones. Later, at the WL press conference on the Afghanistan leaks, the journalist in question used the opportunity to ask what had been so bad about his article. Julian answered something along the lines of “I don’t have any time to take apart that piece of shit.” He continually went on about how journalists didn’t work objectively or base their pieces on primary sources, as should be part of any serious approach to reporting. But he himself never provided any proof when people asked him for evidence fo
r his various tales of persecution.

  I never understood why Julian was so obsessed with the idea he was being followed. It was almost as though he could only be convinced of the significance of his own opposition to the status quo if people thought of him as public enemy number one. In Iceland, he once bought a Solzhenitsyn book titled First Circle. He found the volume in an antique bookshop, and discovering it put a broad smile on his face. Solzhenitsyn is a must-read author for the leftist, anarchistic scene, but for Julian, the Russian author had a special significance. Julian identified with the dissident writer, who was imprisoned for many years in a Soviet gulag and was later exiled to the wilderness of Kazakhstan.

  Julian saw a number of similarities between his own biography and that of the trained mathematician and philosopher. Solzhenitsyn, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was arrested and interned for criticizing Stalin in letters written to a friend. In an early blog entry, Julian had written that “the moment of truth” only arrives “when they come to take you away.” This entry, titled “Jackboots” and written in 2006, is an example of Julian’s tendency to engage in heroic romanticism. In it, Julian wrote about how similar the experiences made by scientists in Russian work camps were to events from his own life. True commitment could only be attained when they come to get you, “when they kick down your door with their jackboots.” Oh boy! Maybe he thought that anything less dramatic simply wouldn’t do.

  On numerous occasions, Julian accused the Icelandic police of keeping him under surveillance. He also informed our—no, sorry, his—Twitter followers that two operatives from the American State Department had followed him onto a plane while he was en route to a conference in Oslo. Our hotel, too, had been watched, Julian trumpeted, and unmarked cars had tailed us. He loved these stories because they assured him of a rapt audience. Once, he terrified a woman he was spending the night with so much with his secret-agent stories that she fled and was too scared to return to her own apartment. Julian stayed behind and made himself comfortable.