These two Swedish data companies and the laws they exploit made WikiLeaks possible. But across the Scandinavian Peninsula and the Norwegian Sea, through an unmarked door in a Reykjavík alley and up a flight of stairs, another hosting company may represent the PRQ and Bahnhof for Jónsdóttir’s next generation of media.
When I ask 1984 Web Hosting founder Mordur Ingólfsson for some examples of his customers, he gives me a simple and defiant response. “I won’t answer that unless you get a court order.”
A forty-one-year-old Icelander rendered hairless by the genetic condition alopecia, Ingólfsson says he created the ironically named firm to “prevent thought control.” The company has become Iceland’s largest Web host, partly by maintaining an attitude in keeping with the island’s Viking personalities. “We don’t respond to threats, intimidation, manipulation, pressure, or probes,” says Ingólfsson. “We will go bankrupt before we break the trust of our customers.”
One thing Ingólfsson won’t do for his customers, however, is break the law. So instead he’s trying to change it, working as the treasurer for Jónsdóttir’s IMMI movement. IMMI is designed to not merely imitate the Swedish laws that brought WikiLeaks to PRQ, but to take them much further. It pulls together the best freedom-of-information laws from every country in the world: Source protection from Sweden, safeguards on third-party communications from Belgium that prevent Internet service providers from having their records subpoenaed, and New York state’s prohibition on using foreign libel laws to bring local lawsuits, for instance. It revamps the Freedom of Information Act that allows citizens to requisition government documents and even introduces a Nobel-style prize for freedom of expression.
Laws aside, Iceland already sports a few features of a perfect island data haven. The newly built Thor Data Center, for instance, on the outskirts of Reykjavík pipes in cheap, green electricity from geothermal power plants along with free arctic air to cool the racks of computers. Its owners hope IMMI will help expand the dozens of servers in the former aluminum plant to thousands, as controversial data from around the globe flocks to Iceland’s protective borders.
Cagey as always, Ingólfsson won’t say where 1984’s servers are housed, but he assures me they’re mostly in Iceland, ready to benefit from Jónsdóttir’s initiative. If IMMI can be passed, he says, it won’t merely boost his business, but help to redeem Iceland from the shame and economic tragedy of the financial crisis that recently saddled every person in the country with the equivalent of $220,000 in debt. “If we succeed, this will be the new cornerstone of the country’s reputation,” he says. “In my humble opinion, IMMI is the most important thing to happen to this godforsaken island since the Sagas were written.”
Tchobanov, Yordanov, and a circle of other Bulgarian journalists sit around a table at a café in the sunny Bulgarian resort town of Varvara. Tchobanov has been leading a training session on using encryption, Tor, and proxy services for reporters to protect sources and themselves. Now they’re drinking beer at noon, eating fried shrimp pulled from the Black Sea nearby, and swapping dirty jokes in Bulgarian. They translate one for me that involves Vladimir Putin, Dmitri Medvedev, and a prostitute.
Tchobanov is sitting next to Yordanov, looking rather tiny beside his heftier, square-bodied partner. The smaller of the two BalkanLeakers is wearing the Bivol T-shirt with the buffalo again. So I ask him why his news site uses the animal as its symbol.
It’s Yordanov who answers. The bulkier Bulgarian wears a pair of very scuffed, knockoff Oakley sunglasses, a half-week’s worth of thick stubble, a black shirt tucked over a barrel chest into black shorts, sandals, and a leather case for his cell phone on his belt. He looks, to my ignorant American eyes, like a caricature of an Eastern European mafia thug on holiday.
“The buffalo is a very special animal,” the fifty-three-year-old reporter intones slowly, with a thick Slavic accent. “It is the most intelligent animal. Much more intelligent than a dog. It has a perfect memory.
“Once, there was a baby buffalo that was beaten very badly by a man,” he continues, in a manner that leaves it unspoken whether he is telling a story from personal experience or as a kind of Aesop’s fable. “It grew up, and eight years later it left the herd one day. When it was found, it had killed the man and trampled him so that you couldn’t recognize him. The buffalo had smelled the man from fifteen kilometers away.
“So in this way we’re like the buffalo,” Yordanov concludes without expression.
“We do not forgive, we do not forget!” explains Tchobanov with a silly grin, borrowing the Anonymous hackers’ slogan.
Tchobanov had mentioned to me in passing that Yordanov had been a cowboy and raised buffalo before becoming an investigative journalist. So I ask how it was that he ended up on that unlikely career path.
There’s a long pause. Then Yordanov speaks, and I can sense from the silence around the table that I’ve now touched on the wrong topic for a sunny lunchtime discussion.
“I was twenty-four years old. And I was married to a woman that I loved very much. And I discovered that my wife, this woman who I loved more than anything in the world, was an agent of the secret police,” he says simply. “She was spying on me in my own home. So that’s why I left the city and became a cowboy.”
I drop the subject, seemingly to the relief of everyone present. But a few hours later, during another break in the training sessions, Assen Yordanov tells me his story.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Yordanov’s grandfather was a general in the Bulgarian resistance leading thousands of guerrilla troops, fighting in the country’s southeastern mountains against the Nazis and the official Bulgarian government that had allied with them. But even after Bulgaria switched to the Allied side near the end of the war and later became a Soviet satellite state, the Communist government distrusted Yordanov’s grandfather’s political power.
On the twenty-eighth of March, 1947, Yordanov’s grandfather’s personal doctor gave him what seemed to be a routine medical injection. He died half an hour later, while his twenty-seven-year-old wife and seven-year-old son, Assen Yordanov’s father, watched. An autopsy was never performed.
Yordanov’s grandmother was asked to sign a statement that cut all ties with her dead husband. She refused. So she and her family remained enemies of the state, shunned and ignored even by their neighbors for close to a decade.
Assen Yordanov grew up with only a shadow of those years hanging over his childhood. His father had become a man of letters and a famous poet within Bulgaria, and the younger Yordanov sailed through school, publishing poems and essays in the local newspaper. He graduated from Konstantin Preslavski University with high marks and performed his military service with distinction in the region of the country close to the Turkish border. Yordanov mostly stayed away from politics. But he didn’t hide his hatred of the Communist regime. “I knew our society was heading toward a dead end, and I wasn’t afraid to say so,” he says.
While he worked toward his master’s degree in Bulgarian literature and philology, he took a job as an audio and video engineer in the local Burgas theater. It was there he met a petite Turkish actress, a very pretty twenty-four-year-old with short dark hair and brown eyes. He asked her to marry him three days later.
They had been husband and wife for one year when a friend in the government called Yordanov and asked to meet for a walk in Burgas Park. There the agitated friend told him about a detailed report he had stumbled upon, and asked him to promise that he would never reveal his source. The report was written by Yordanov’s wife under the pseudonym “Christina.” She was a paid informant of the same secret services that had engineered the murder of his grandfather. For the last year, she had monitored and reported every word he and his parents had said. The books he read. The jokes he told his friends.
“When I found out, I didn’t know what was real or false, what was true and what was a lie. The thi
nking in my head turned to marmalade,” Yordanov says. He stumbled out of the park in a state of dazed denial.
Yordanov says his wife rejected his accusations, then confessed, then collapsed and cried for forgiveness. She promised to end her work for the secret services, which had begun six years earlier during her years as a student in Sofia. “But I knew that once you’re part of this system, you can’t get out,” he says. “It’s not a disease that can be cured.”
He felt betrayed by Bulgarian society at the deepest level. So he simply left it behind.
Yordanov divorced his wife and began a period of wandering in the Strandzha Mountains. He passed through communities where only handfuls of people lived, and eventually settled in a village of about thirty people, taking up residence in an abandoned building on its outskirts. He had no access to electricity, carried all the water he used up a cliff face half a mile away, and stopped cutting his beard or hair. He went months without speaking. “I never wanted to see a human face again,” he says. “I wanted to live by different laws. To escape the laws of man.”
To sustain himself, Yordanov worked as a shepherd in a cooperative farm. With no expenses, he eventually saved enough to buy three cows, a buffalo, and later ten sheep and three goats, and began selling their milk. Feed suppliers who learned that he was an enemy of the state refused to sell to him, so he grew his own oats, beans, corn, and alfalfa, hiring locals to help tend the crops.
After his first year as a cowboy, he left his bare-bones shelter and went into the forest to live with his herd. When the animals wandered wild, he wandered with them, riding horses and sometimes training and riding the buffalo themselves. He slept occasionally in a shack he found in the woods, more often on the ground, in caves or in trees, wherever he was when night fell. Eventually his itinerant farm grew to more than 150 animals.
Yordanov spent nearly five years this way. He would receive mail and occasional phone calls from the nearest village once a week. And then in late 1992 he got word from his seventy-three-year-old grandmother that his father was moving to Sofia. So he sold his beloved herd and returned to the city to take care of her.
Back in Burgas, he found that Bulgarian society was utterly transformed—on its surface, if not at its corrupted core. The Communist regime that had wrecked his life had been disassembled and reassembled in the hands of several well-connected oligarchs. The Darzhavna Sigurnost secret service had evaporated in name, but many of the same faces had found their way into the new government.
For a year he lived in a state of culture shock, taking temporary jobs in construction and as a dockworker at the Port of Burgas with no ambition or direction. And then a friend told him about a job opening at the Dneven Trud, or Labor Daily, the country’s biggest newspaper. With his father’s name and his education in literature, Yordanov got the job.
Within months, Yordanov discovered he had a gift for eliciting bombshell stories from sources. “With me people seem to feel that they can tell me anything without danger,” he says simply. He showed unusual fearlessness in publishing articles about mafia murders, government corruption, and the privatization of the country’s resources, and soon he was seen as one of Bulgaria’s top muckrakers in the eastern part of the country.
During the Yugoslavian wars of the mid-1990s, Serbia had been struck with an international embargo. As a result, Bulgaria’s eastern coast across the Black Sea from Russia became a lucrative smuggling gateway. In 1994, Yordanov established through confidential sources that the Burgas airport was being used in a complex scheme involving local mafia and the government, with undeclared tankers arriving laden with oil, cigarettes, weapons, and gold and being registered at the airport rather than the port to hide their cargo. He published the eight-page story in Standard Weekly and immediately faced a series of defamation suits. All were eventually dropped, and the chief customs officer of Burgas was indicted on smuggling charges and convicted.
The next year, Yordanov got a tip that a factory north of Burgas was being used for illegal cigarette production. He gained access to the building in the middle of the night, took pictures, and published the story. Soon after, he received his first death threat, a letter delivered by messenger that suggested he “reserve a place in the cemetery for his tomb.” The police raided the factory and shut it down, and began a two-year investigation against the politicians and businessmen involved, which mysteriously ended without arrests.
Yordanov suddenly interrupts his storytelling. The sun has set, and he’s taken off his sunglasses to reveal a pair of deep-set and sad eyes. “I want to stop here and say something,” he says. “One of those men involved in this factory that I exposed was Boyko Borisov. Today, he is the prime minister of Bulgaria. And sixteen years ago I showed that he is a criminal.”
“A scent of death bleeds into the scent of Christmas,” begins Birgitta Jónsdóttir’s illustrated memoir, The Chameleon’s Diary. Sewing together childhood dreams and memories, she tells the story of a small girl with black hair and pale skin in the tiny Icelandic fishing village of Thorlákshöfn, who ran up and down the slippery, rotting black wood at the edges of the pier, using her mother’s violin bow as a fishing pole and terrifying the old men who worked on the wharf.
Jónsdóttir’s mother, Bergthóra Arnadóttir, had moved to the town of eight hundred Icelanders to escape Jónsdóttir’s mentally disturbed birth father, whom Arnadóttir had married at the age of sixteen. The mother and four-year-old daughter soon met her stepfather, a kind, sturdy fishing boat captain with long sideburns and one of the biggest houses in the village. It was the young Jónsdóttir, not her mother, who brought up the idea of marriage. “I proposed to him,” she says. “I got down on my knees and asked him to be my father.”
Jónsdóttir would remain close to her stepfather even after her parents divorced a few years later, and she says he taught her lessons she would remember: He lived simply and honestly, paid his employees before himself, and carried no debts. She called him “the Fisher King.”
Arnadóttir was a well-known folk singer who organized a monthly music night in Reykjavík, and her daughter grew up surrounded by artists, musicians, and writers. Jónsdóttir pored over her grandparents’ books on Tibetan Buddhism and the American spiritualist Edgar Cayce. As she grew into her teens, she discovered the punk scene and its roots in anarchist politics. Her mother recorded her first album at the same recording studio as Björk, during the recording of the Icelandic pop star’s premiere record. Jónsdóttir remembers that once, while her mother strummed her guitar and sang, the two teenagers whispered secrets to each other in the studio’s attic.
Surrounded by uncompromising artists and writers from that young age, Jónsdóttir says she never had much use for conformity. She bought a secondhand tuxedo jacket with long tails, and painted an enormous anarchist symbol on its back in orange. When her mother entered her into a youth modeling competition, she responded by cutting her hair into a towering black Mohawk. She blew the whistle on her sexually abusive teacher. And when a school trip took her class to visit a Coca-Cola factory and then the Icelandic Parliament building, the Althingi, she refused to go inside. Instead, the fourteen-year-old sat on the school bus and wrote a poem about a nuclear holocaust with an eyeliner pencil on a paper bag.
It was called “Svartar Rósir,” or “Black Roses,” and was later published in the newspaper Helgarpósturinn. “I look out the window and see collapsed houses,” it reads in English.
I look out the window
and I see streams of blood.
I look out the window
and I see the black ashes
and remains of human bodies.
This is all that’s left
of our humanity.
One stormy Christmas Eve just before the traditional six o’clock Icelandic Christmas dinner, Jónsdóttir’s stepfather arrived at her grandparents’ home in Hveragerði, dropped off he
r younger brother, then abruptly plunged back into the blizzard, saying he needed to deliver a package to a friend’s place.
The next day, he was still missing. The police found his car next to a river, a ten-minute drive away from the village. There was no body or suicide note. But the police concluded that he must have drowned himself in the icy floes. “My father the Fisher King killed himself last night. . . . I pictured him in my mind’s eye walking heavily into the river, a little bit bent. A lone dark shadow in a blizzard of white,” she would write. “I have to remain strong. I have erected an iron raft in my back, it will not bend.”
In the months that followed, Jónsdóttir’s mother moved to Denmark in a state of near emotional collapse, and Jónsdóttir followed her there to care for her. The young woman entered a state of self-imposed exile, painting, writing, and reflection that she describes as a walk “through the valley of the shadows.” Her first volume of poetry, Frostdinglar or “Icicles,” was published the next year. When she returned to Iceland to launch the book, she met a handsome, sensitive young Icelandic-American photographer, with large brown eyes and thick black hair that fell over his forehead.
The twenty-two-year-old Jónsdóttir was given a grant by Iceland’s government to stay in Reykjavík and write a book a year, an idea that struck her as deathly boring. Her photographer boyfriend, on the other hand, wanted to return to the United States to reconnect with his American father, and asked her to come with him. To avoid immigration hassles they were married, and six weeks after the birth of their son, they moved to West Virginia. After a few weeks there, the new family put their belongings into a trailer and took a road trip across the country, finally settling in Medford, New Jersey, where Jónsdóttir sold Kirby vacuum cleaners door-to-door to pay the bills while writing and painting.
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