WikiLeaks (10 page)

The
Guardian
in London now saw the value in having its own sensitive documents posted on WikiLeaks. Lawyers for Barclays Bank had woken up a judge one morning at 2am to force the takedown of the
Guardian
’s leaked files detailing the bank’s tax-avoidance schemes. But the files were promptly posted in full by Assange, rendering the gag futile. (In an entertaining blend of old and new anti-censorship techniques, the
Guardian
and all other British media were also at first legally gagged from saying that the files were available on WikiLeaks. It took a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords, speaking under the ancient device of parliamentary privilege, to blow that nonsense away.)

Similarly, WikiLeaks functioned as an online back-up, along with Dutch Greenpeace and Norwegian state TV, in posting in full a damning report on toxic waste dumped by the oil traders Trafigura. Trafigura’s lawyers had gagged the
Guardian
in the UK from running the leaked report: their draconian moves were thus proved to be a waste of time in a digitally globalised world.

Yet Assange himself was still striving for a way to be more than a niche player. At the outset, in 2006, he had incurred the ire of John Young, of the parallel intelligence-material site Cryptome. Young deplored Assange’s approaches to billionaire George Soros, who funded a variety of mostly eastern European media projects, and he broke off relations angrily when Assange talked of raising $5 million. “Announcing a $5 million fund-raising goal by July [2007] will kill this effort,” he wrote. “It makes WikiLeaks appear to be a Wall Street scam. This amount could not be needed so soon except for suspect purposes. Soros will kick you out of the office with such over-reaching. Foundations are flooded with big talkers making big requests flaunting famous names and promising spectacular results.”

Now, two years on from that false start, Assange made another attempt to raise a substantial sum. He and his lieutenant, Domscheit-Berg, approached the Knight Foundation in the US, which was running “a media innovation contest that aims to advance the future of news by funding new ways to digitally inform communities”. Domscheit-Berg asked for $532,000 to equip a network of regional newspapers with what were, in effect, “WikiLeaks buttons”. The idea, developed and elaborated by Domscheit-Berg, was that local leakers could make contact through these news sites, and thus generate a regular flow of documents. A rival project, Documentcloud, designed to set up a public database of the full documents behind conventional news stories, was backed by staff at the
New York Times
and the nonprofit investigative journalism initiative ProPublica. They got $719,500. Assange got nothing. As 2009 ended, WikiLeaks was still struggling to make a name for itself.

Quality Hotel, Tønsberg, Norway
3am, 21 March 2010

“
It’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle
”
US
HELICOPTER PILOT

Even in March, there was still ice in the harbour, and snow lay on the Slottsfjellet hill where the old fortress stood. But down in the waterfront hotel ballroom, the Boogie Wonder Band were hard at it: they were pumping out sweaty dance rhythms for hundreds of Norwegian reporters celebrating the Jubileumsfest – the 20th anniversary shindig of SKUP, the lively association of investigative journalists. “Bring nice clothes and good humour,” said the invitation; and although Assange had not changed out of his regular brown leather jacket zipped up to the neck, he was certainly in a good mood. In fact, he was excited, and with good reason: he was about to take the first step towards becoming a world celebrity.

The billing for his lecture read, “Some believe the WikiLeaks site has done more investigative journalism than the
New York Times
over the past 20 years.” But Assange knew that the world had seen nothing yet, compared with what was about to come. After a night of reindeer steaks and repeated Viking-style toasts
with raised glasses, he could contain himself no longer. “Want to see something?” he asked David Leigh, the
Guardian
journalist who was also speaking at the conference. Assange, with his lean frame and long silver hair, had a boyishly enticing grin that had already been having its effect on nearby women: his present invitation was also intriguing.

Up in Leigh’s hotel bedroom, with the door locked and the chain on, Assange produced one of his little netbooks from the backpack he never let out of his sight. He punched in a series of what seemed like lengthy passwords, and after a while a black-and-white video began to run. It was one of the most shocking things Leigh had ever seen.

The money shot, later played again and again on YouTube from China to Brazil, was a view from the air: it showed clouds of dust erupting among a scattering group of men, as they were knocked down and killed by the cannon-shells of a helicopter gunship. One man, wounded, was trying to crawl away from the carnage off to the right of the screen. Later a driver can be seen trying to drag the wounded man into a van, which is shot up by more cannon-fire. Told on the radio traffic that children were hurt, a pilot transmits, defensively: “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”

The pictures had been taken by an AH-64 Apache’s military camera as it hovered over a Baghdad suburb, firing its 30mm gun while virtually invisible to those on the ground. The helicopter was a kilometre up in the sky. Leigh watched, stunned, as the uncut video of these killings ran on the little laptop for nearly 39 minutes.

The video was, explained Assange, the classified record of a scandal. In July 2007, US army pilots, in a pair of circling helicopters, had managed to kill two innocent employees of the Reuters news agency: Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. Noor-Eldeen was a 22-year-old war photographer. Chmagh was a 40-year-old Reuters driver and assistant, who had been wounded
and attempted to crawl away. Altogether 12 people died in that single encounter. The van driver’s two young children were wounded, but survived.

Assange didn’t say where the raw video had come from, other than that he had got hold of a cache of material from “military sources”. But he did tell the
Guardian
journalist what he planned to do next. He was going to travel to Iceland, where he would arrange for this sensational leak to be verified and edited up into a properly captioned version. Then he would reveal it to the world.

Iceland, in the far north Atlantic, was not so weird a destination for Assange as might be thought. The nomadic WikiLeaks founder had recently become popular there, since agreeing to post a leaked secret document listing major Icelandic bank loans which had been made to bankers’ cronies, and the bank’s own large shareholders. Iceland’s financial meltdown had left an angry and resentful populace behind, and they seemed to appreciate Assange’s brand of transparency.

Kristinn Hrafnsson was one of many Icelanders impressed by Assange. He was so inspired that he subsequently became his close lieutenant. Hrafnsson, who was to travel to Baghdad with a cameraman to check out the Apache helicopter story on Assange’s behalf, says: “The first I heard of WikiLeaks was at the beginning of August 2009. I was working as a reporter for state television when I got a tip this website had important documents just posted online. It was the loan book for the failed Kaupthing Bank … They [the bank] got a gag order on the state TV – the first and only one in its history.”

The scandal brought an invitation to Reykjavik for Assange and his colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and the two campaigners found themselves urging the small country to promote its own free speech laws. Assange sat on the TV studio sofa and declared: “Why doesn’t Iceland become the centre for publishing in the world?” Domscheit-Berg recalls: “Julian and I were just throwing
that idea out, declaring on national TV that we thought this would be the next business model for Iceland. That felt pretty weird … realising the next day that everyone wanted to talk about it.”

Assange was like a pied piper, gathering followers around him in region after region. Another Iceland-based WikiLeaks enthusiast, programmer Smári McCarthy, told Swedish TV, “We had failed as a country because we had not been sharing the information that we needed. We were in an information famine … WikiLeaks gave us the nudge that we needed. We had this idea but didn’t know what to do with it. Then they came and told us, and that is an incredibly valuable thing. They are information activists first and foremost, who believe in the power of knowledge, the power of information.”

An Icelandic MP, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, was at the forefront of subsequent moves to draw up a proposal the campaigners called MMI, the Modern Media Initiative, which was endorsed unanimously by the Icelandic parliament. The proposal was stitched together by Assange, his Dutch hacker-businessman friend Rop Gonggrijp, and three Icelanders: Jónsdóttir, McCarthy and Herbert Snorrason. They called for laws to enshrine source protection, free speech and freedom of information. Jónsdóttir, 43, is an anti-capitalist activist, poet and artist – an unexpectedly romantic figure to find in the Reykjavik legislature. “They were presenting this idea they called the ‘Switzerland of bytes’,” she explains, “which was basically to take the tax haven model and transform it into the transparency haven model.”

Assange decided to publish some Icelandic tidbits from his newly acquired secret cache of military material to coincide with the MMI campaign: one was a very recent cable from the US embassy in Reykjavik, dated 13 January 2010, describing Icelandic officials’ views about the banking crisis. The deputy chief of mission at the embassy, Sam Watson, had reported that those he met “painted a very gloomy picture for Iceland’s future”. Assange followed this up
with leaked profiles of the Icelandic ambassador to Washington (“prickly but pragmatic … enjoys the music of Robert Plant, formerly of Led Zeppelin”), the foreign minister (“fond of the US”), and the prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir (“although her sexual orientation has been highlighted by the international press, it has barely been noted by the Icelandic public”).

The US authorities took no visible action about these leaks. There was nothing apparently to connect Reykjavik, where this stuff was coming out, with an obscure military base in the Mesopotamian desert, thousands of miles away.

So at the end of March, Assange returned to Iceland from his triumphant conference appearance in Norway, and, bankrolled by an advance of €10,000 ($13,000) from Gonggrijp, set about renting a house and editing his Apache helicopter film. Leigh, back in London, tried hard to get back into contact to propose a deal under which the
Guardian
would publicise the helicopter video. Assange said he would get back to him, but never did. It was only later that it seemed Assange might have struck a more attractive journalistic deal with the
New Yorker
, whose writer Raffi Khatchadourian was following Assange about for a major profile. (It appeared in June under the title “No Secrets: Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency”. Assange assured friends later that it was “too flattering”.)

Khatchadourian was present to record Jónsdóttir, the feisty feminist MP for Reykjavik South, rather unwillingly trimming Assange’s hair while he sat hunched over his laptop, engaged in important messaging. The profile writer was also taking notes when the message came back from Baghdad:

The journalists who had gone to Baghdad … had found the two children in the van. The children had lived a block from the location of the attack, and were being driven to school by their father that morning. “They remember the bombardment,
felt great pain, they said, and lost consciousness,” one of the journalists wrote …

Jónsdóttir turned to Gonggrijp, whose eyes had welled up. “Are you crying?” she asked.

“I am,” he said. “OK, OK, it is just the kids. It hurts.” Gonggrijp gathered himself. “Fuck!” he said … Jónsdóttir was now in tears, too, and wiping her nose.

Assange premiered the Apache helicopter video at the National Press Club in Washington on 5 April. He chose to title it “Collateral Murder”. Although the video caused a stir, something went wrong. It did not generate the universal outrage and pressure for reform of, say, Seymour Hersh’s earlier exposé of leaked photos in the
New Yorker
showing Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and tortured in Abu Ghraib prison.

One of the reasons why the video caused less of a storm than he had hoped was that Reuters, whose own employees had been killed, chose not to go on the attack over the leaked information. They had, it transpired, been shown privately a partial clip of the two men’s deaths, within days of it happening, although subsequent freedom of information requests for the actual video had been repeatedly blocked. Reuters’ editor-in-chief, David Schlesinger, wrote a muted, more-in-sorrow column for the
Guardian
:

“Reuters editors were shown only one portion of the video. We immediately changed our operating procedures. The first portion of the video made clear that anyone walking with a group of armed people could be considered a target. We immediately made it a rule that our journalists could not even walk near armed groups. However, we were not shown the second part of the video, where the helicopter fired on a van trying to evacuate the wounded. Had we seen it, we could have adjusted our procedures further.”

Another reason for the limited response was the tendentious title: “Collateral Murder”. Readers and viewers often hate the
feeling they are being bulldozed into a particular point of view. What went on in the video could be interpreted as a much more nuanced event, to eyes not entirely blinded by rage or sorrow.