Inside WikiLeaks

by Daniel Domscheit-Berg

  The nanny even came to Germany and visited me at the computer club. It was on November 1, a gray Monday, and the weather was miserable. I think it was the first time that winter we had to put the heat on. I was sitting at the club’s large meeting table, with my back to the wall and my eyes on the door. We spotted each other immediately.

  The nanny hadn’t read the Spiegel interview, maintaining, “I don’t want to know any of that.” She smiled pleasantly at me. I smiled back a little. Then she pulled out a list.

  “These are the points that I’d like to clarify with you,” she said.

  “I haven’t got much time,” I said.

  She read out, “ ‘Access codes’?” And then looked at me questioningly.

  I don’t think that she even knew herself what this was supposed to mean. It just sounded good. Passwords? I didn’t have any passwords, or anything else. I explained to her that there had been a proper handover and that I was sorry if she had been misinformed. I really did feel sorry for her. Julian had sent her on a mission to sort out one thing or another and had told her a bunch of half-truths.

  I explained why I didn’t want to return the submissions documents to Julian at this point. I asked her if she thought that things were going well at WikiLeaks. But she didn’t really give me an answer.

  She looked at me as if she didn’t understand what language I was speaking.

  I think she was flabbergasted when I stood up to leave. She wasn’t used to that. Could anything be more important than a conversation with her?

  I didn’t want to keep my literary agent waiting. We had an appointment to work on the pitch for my book.

  “Sorry, I have to go now,” I said. And that was that.

  THE next WL publication was the so-called cables—the dispatches written by American diplomats. They had already caused quite a lot of disruption among us.

  I had always asked myself why Julian was in such a big hurry to release the documents. Julian had said his hand was forced because the Icelander had already passed on the material, but no one really seemed to understand the logic behind this. I learned later that the Guardian had gotten hold of the material from the freelance journalist Heather Brooke. She had copied the cables from the Icelander onto her hard drive. The Guardian apparently wanted to publish them independently of Julian. That story made sense. It was possible the next leak could happen without Julian Assange.

  There is no way the old WL core team would have agreed to release the material at this time. Rumors began to swirl that it would appear on the final weekend of November.

  At the time, Anke, Jacob, and I were visiting my parents-in-law in the countryside near Berlin. When I saw that the e-paper version of Der Spiegel, “for editorial reasons,” was only going online on Sunday, and not as usual on Saturday, I knew what was happening. I drove back to our Berlin apartment to clean up. I got rid of everything that could attract even the slightest interest of the police—although the apartment contained nothing incriminating at all, not even a falsely calculated café bill to be deducted from my taxes. But I suspected what a search would be like. Theodor Reppe, the sponsor of the German WikiLeaks domain, had told me about how his home was searched in 2009. He’d had to explain to the officers that his subwoofer wasn’t a computer. The police usually confiscate everything vaguely resembling a computer or telephone. I didn’t want to have to do without my computer in the coming days. And if someone called, I wanted to be able to answer the phone.

  Investigators also secure any and all documents—as far as they knew, something “thermonuclear” could be lurking at the bottom of the pile of paper waiting to be recycled in our kitchen. Or my notebook might contain the key to the WL insurance file. So I tried to rid our apartment of anything that the police might think they should take with them.

  On Sunday, November 28, the first dispatches began appearing on the website Cablegate.org, which was created especially for the leak. As the site explained, the documents were confidential communiqués between the US State Department and 274 embassies around the world, dating from 1966 to late February 2010. Of 250,000, 15,652 of the dispatches were classified as “secret.” Only a fraction of them, however—a few hundred in total—appeared on the Cablegate page.

  The story that Der Spiegel made out of this material was pretty banal, focusing largely on bitchy things that US diplomats had written about world leaders: French president Nicolas Sarkozy was hypersensitive and authoritarian; Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin, an alpha male; German chancellor Angela Merkel, indecisive and uninspired; German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle, a greenhorn; and Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, a vain party animal. All of them came in for a roundhouse, but the actual content was minimal. None of the dispatches were particularly shocking. The individuals with the most reason to feel insulted were those who weren’t mentioned—because they weren’t important enough.

  The publication strategy was obvious, and I understood why Der Spiegel was taking it easy at the start. The 250,000 cables in total would only gradually appear on the Cablegate site. The journalists were in no hurry to make them public. The newspapers and magazines—Der Spiegel, the Guardian, El País, and Le Monde—wanted to exploit the material at their leisure, and if the publications continued at this pace, WL could live off them for months.

  This time around, the New York Times was only onboard because the Guardian had given them the material, and I figured I knew why. The newspaper had published an unflattering article about Julian.

  I can only speculate why the Guardian shared the material with the Times. They likely didn’t approve of Julian’s attempt to revenge himself for a negative article. And the Guardian probably didn’t want to go it alone on the English-language market in case the publications caused legal trouble. It was good for them to have a partner in the country the writers of the dispatches came from.

  The documents as they appeared on the Cablegate page were altered. Only WikiLeaks’s five exclusive media partners had access to the truly controversial details. Without doubt, it was correct to edit submissions out of the cables that contained information that could endanger individuals—our media partners had insisted we black out revealing details before documents could be published. They included the names and identifying information of Chinese dissidents and Russian or Iranian journalists who had spoken with US diplomats.

  Julian agreed with this. He himself had asked the US ambassador in London to help WikiLeaks identify passages that could have put others at risk. As later reported in the media, the head lawyer of the US State Department had answered that the United States did not negotiate with people who had acquired material illegally. Julian had made a similar request of the New York Times with regard to the Afghanistan leaks, albeit a scant twenty-four hours before WikiLeaks published the material. He later complained that he’d gotten no help with blacking out names and revealing data.

  WL’s five chosen partners enjoyed a privileged position and could exploit the cables to attract more readers. That meant considerable stress for the world’s remaining media outlets. They, too, had to write their articles, conduct their interviews, and film their reports. Their only option was to counter the competition’s exclusives with sensationalist headlines. For instance, the German newsweekly Stern, Der Spiegel’s main competitor, published a pretty decent story on Bradley Manning that featured an unfortunate picture of the man within a set of superimposed sniper’s crosshairs and the headline that translates into English as THIS INNOCENT LOOKING FELLOW IS HUMILIATING THE US. It was a crass and ruthless way of packaging the story, worthier of a tabloid than a serious newsmagazine.

  The media also desperately needed experts they could interview and quote. Julian wasn’t giving any press conferences. Sweden had issued an international warrant for his arrest, and he had gone underground. Interview requests could not be sent directly to WL because the mail server was still down. As a result, anyone with something vaguely Internet-related on his résumé could become an e
xpert on WikiLeaks. In Germany, for instance, the blogger and social-media specialist Sascha Lobo appeared on a major political talk show to discuss WL with a public-relations advisor.

  Starting on Sunday, November 28, my phone rang from morning until night. “Hello, Moscow calling. Mr. Domscheit-Berg, are you available for an interview today?” On Tuesday, it was the Japanese; on Thursday, I traveled to Cologne to appear on Stern TV, and on Friday, the press was lying in wait for me at a long-planned appearance I had agreed to put in at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation in Hamburg. Reporters used every trick in the book to try to make contact. They sent messages to my wife’s Facebook page and called the press office of her employer. They even got in touch with the Italian restaurant around the corner from where we lived. Everyone wanted me to comment. Ideally, they wanted to hear me say how evil WL was, now that I had left the project and presumably wanted to avenge myself on Julian.

  I was astonished by the number of people around this time who announced their unmitigated support for Julian Assange. Time magazine had placed him on their short list for Person of the Year. Mark Zuckerberg, the comparably controversial founder of Facebook, would ultimately take that honor, but he was the editors’ choice. Julian got the most votes from Time’s readership—bizarrely, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan came in second with readers.

  I was of two minds about the people who, in the wake of the cables leak, began to attack the websites of Switzerland’s PostFinance, Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, and Moneybookers—all service providers who refused to honor contracts with WL after open hostility broke out between the project and the US State Department. The guys from Anonymous no doubt took the lead here. Their criticism of these firms was justified, and cyberattacks were their only means of getting politically involved. But they also attacked the website of the Swedish prosecutor’s office, and that, to my eyes, revealed some people’s inability to distinguish between political and private issues.

  Journalists from all over the world were among those who came together to support Julian. The ringleader was Gavin MacFadyen of the Centre for Investigative Journalism. He posted a statement from the International Federation of Journalists expressing concern over Julian’s situation: “Assange has been forced into hiding and is the subject of an international police investigation over allegations concerning sexual offences in Sweden.”

  After the publication of the cables, prosecutors in Australia were also examining the possibilities of criminally charging Julian. More than four thousand people signed a letter of protest, composed by two hundred prominent politicians, academics, lawyers, artists, and journalists, against the prosecutors’ actions. On December 10, after Julian had turned himself in to British authorities, the Guardian also published an open letter signed by—among others—the Australian journalist John Pilger, the writer A. L. Kennedy, and the former ambassador and political activist Craig Murray. One section reads:

  The US government and its allies, and their friends in the media, have built up a campaign against Assange which now sees him in prison facing extradition on dubious charges, with the presumed eventual aim of ensuring his extradition to the US. We demand the immediate release, the dropping of all charges, and an end to the censorship of WikiLeaks.

  On December 8, the Australian Internet organization GetUp! posted a letter of support for Julian that attracted 45,000 signatures within forty-eight hours. It called on President Obama and US Attorney General Eric Holder to stand up for the principles of innocent-until-proven-guilty and freedom of information. GetUp! announced plans to run the letter as a full-page advertisement in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

  Journalist Miranda Devine, usually associated with the political right, also leaped publicly to Julian’s defense, criticizing what she called the special character of the charges raised against him in Sweden and opining that no one believed he was sitting in a British jail because he was a rapist. Perhaps less surprising was the support Julian received from filmmaker Michael Moore. Moore had already contacted WL after the release of “Collateral Murder,” and he was now donating the $20,000 in bail money that secured Julian’s release from prison. The irony is that Julian himself always regarded the filmmaker as an idiot.

  He had a similar attitude toward another of his prominent supporters, the American feminist Naomi Wolf, whose lecture series accompanying her book Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries Julian once dismissed as “banal stuff.” Many of Julian’s supporters may be stars, but I know what he really thinks of at least several of them. In his eyes, they are useful idiots, junior players, wannabes.

  A lot of people probably think it’s fashionable to run around sporting “Support Julian Assange” buttons and stickers. These are the same sorts of people who reflexively applaud every time the United States suffers any sort of setback.

  Julian described his arrest as a witch hunt ultimately aimed at getting him extradited to the United States. When he was released on bail, his supporters inside and outside the courthouse began to cheer. Julian pumped his fists in triumph before disappearing, in electronic foot-cuffs, off to the country estate of his friend Vaughan Smith in southeast England.

  Every day hordes of supporters and journalists await him outside the gates of Smith’s estate. Julian has bragged that his next leak will be of tens of thousands of documents concerning the global financial crisis sufficient to bring down a bank in the United States, because the material chronicles unethical practices and grotesque legal violations. Julian has promised people a lot. Let’s hope the media won’t be disappointed. He has promised his fans that the pace of publications will accelerate and that WikiLeaks is invincible and able to fend off all attempts to “behead” the organization. I ask myself what material he is referring to, how he got it, and how it is being stored. I hope he’s got it somewhere safe and sound.

  Since the cables leak, Julian has been fearlessly aggressive in his public appearances. The nanny had long wanted to get him a PR advisor.

  The formulations on the WikiLeaks website have also become more cautious. Where we used to claim “Submitting documents to WikiLeaks is safe, easy and protected by law,” he now only says “Submitting documents to our journalists is protected by law in better democracies.” The submissions category now also includes the statement “WikiLeaks accepts a range of material, but we do not solicit it.” In addition, the word “classified” has disappeared from the “most wanted” list of materials.

  When I look at recent TV and newspaper pictures of Julian, he seems a lot older. The mischievous grin he sometimes used to flash is gone. He seems slicker and better-looking, more like the head of a company. I liked him a lot better when he sported a backpack and old blue jeans.

  I was invited to appear on Stern TV in Germany, which gave me a chance to experience the media circus from the other side.

  Before the show I waited around in the greenroom. With me was a fellow guest, the former Swiss ambassador to Germany, Thomas Borer. He’s known chiefly for the false accusations of an extramarital affair with a model that German tabloids made about him in 2002. Borer came over to me and introduced himself with the words “I really admire people who show civic courage.” How nice of him, I thought—until he added, “That’s something people have often said about me, too.” Borer’s tone was relaxed, statesmanlike. His chest was puffed out a bit, and his voice had the most sonorous tone he could manage.

  We then went to the dressing room of the host, Günther Jauch, to discuss the show. Borer and I took our seats, and I prepared myself for a couple of questions from one of Germany’s best-known entertainment journalists. I flattered myself that I was somewhat different from Jauch’s usual guests, and I figured he would relish the opportunity to talk about something truly substantial. But after two or three sentences, the plans for the show were over: I’ll ask you something, and then you, and then we’ll have a discussion. That dealt with, Borer and Jauch began to talk about a topic closer to their h
earts—real-estate prices for lakefront property in Zürich and Berlin.

  I was bored out of my mind. The outside world was full of news about some potentially very significant diplomatic revelations, and here in Jauch’s dressing room we were talking about how much a waterfront view was worth.

  In general, the media wanted me to repudiate WL. I was cautious. The more generic and neutral my answers were, the more leading the questions asked by journalists became. I tried to resist their lures. What the debate about WikiLeaks continues to lack is a differentiated analysis of the various points of criticism. That’s too complicated to be packed into media-friendly sound bites.

  Of course Julian deserves support. Above all, we Europeans have to prevent him from being extradited to the United States, where some people have called for him to face the death penalty. That would set a terrible precedent, and we can’t allow it to happen. On the other hand, I don’t understand how people can object to him facing a regular court in Sweden.

  The charges against him have nothing to do with WikiLeaks. They’re about Julian as a private person and two women, and he should face those accusations. If he doesn’t, it would be a clear abuse of power—the sort of abuse WikiLeaks tries to prevent where other people are concerned.

  Julian once said something very revealing in an Australian documentary. He had just appeared on Larry King Live, and his face was all over the covers of international newspapers and magazines. Lost in what seemed to be a narcissistic daydream, Julian muttered, “Now I am untouchable in this country.” The journalist who was interviewing Julian did a double take.

  “That’s a bit of hubris,” he said.

  “Well, for a couple of days,” Julian added.

  No one should be untouchable. Not even Julian Assange. I cannot understand how anyone else can support this idea, even for a second.

  I hope that everyone concerned gets a fair trial in Sweden, and I don’t see any reason to believe otherwise. Sweden is not known for its hanging judges, its susceptibility to American influence, or a judicial system that lacks transparency. If Julian is innocent, and I presume he is unless and until the opposite is proven, he has nothing to fear.