WikiLeaks (19 page)

Assange had launched the publication of the Iraq logs in the grandiose ballroom of the Park Plaza hotel on the Thames, with Iraq Body Count, Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers, and a TV documentary team all in attendance. Shortly before 10am, the teams lined up in the corridor behind Assange, who was wearing a sharp suit and tie, and led them out into a blizzard of flashbulbs and camera lights. He was mobbed. It was as if the Australian were a rock star with his entourage. About 300 journalists had turned out to watch his performance, five times more than at the launch of the Afghan logs. When the packed room was called to order, Assange intoned: “This disclosure is about the truth.”

He had now delivered two of his controversial leaked “packages” to the newspapers, with striking results. But the question in the
Guardian
and
New York Times
journalists’ minds, as they watched the adulation, was would Assange be prepared to honour his undertaking, and hand over “package three” for publication? That might prove even more sensational.

Near Lochnagar, Scotland
August 2010

“
ACollectionOfDiplomaticHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#
”
A
SSANGE’S
58-
CHARACTER PASSWORD

David Leigh had listened patiently to Assange, who had instructed him that he must never allow his memory stick to be connected to any computer that was exposed to the internet, for fear of electronic eavesdropping by US intelligence. But there was currently no danger of that at all. Leigh’s rented cottage way up in the Scottish Highlands was unable even to receive a TV signal, never mind a broadband connection. The
Guardian
’s investigations editor had originally planned to spend his annual summer vacation with his wife, hill-walking in the Grampians. But the summits of Dreish, Mayar, Lochnagar and Cat Law went unclimbed. He sat transfixed at his desk instead, while the sun rose and set daily on the heather-covered hills outside. On the tiny silver Hewlett Packard thumb-drive plugged into his MacBook were the full texts of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables. To search through them was maddening, tiring – and utterly compelling.

It had been a struggle to prise these documents out of Assange back in London. There were repeated pilgrimages to the mews house belonging to Vaughan Smith’s Frontline Club near Paddington station before Assange reluctantly turned them over. “We have to able to work on them, Julian,” Leigh had argued. “None of the partners have any real idea what’s there, except their contents are supposed to give Hillary Clinton a heart attack!” Assange was keeping the three news organisations dangling, despite his original agreement to deliver all the material for publication. He willingly passed on the less important war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, but talked of how he would use his power to withhold the cables in order to “discipline” the mainstream media.

The atmosphere had become even more problematic since Nick Davies personally broke off relations in the summer, after Assange breached the original compact, as Davies saw it, by going behind his back to the
Guardian
’s TV rivals at Channel 4, taking with him all the knowledge acquired by privileged visits to the
Guardian
’s research room. Davies at the time said he felt betrayed: Assange simply insisted there had never been a deal.

The other
Guardian
journalists tightened their lips and held their peace. There was still a long road to travel if all the leaks were ever to come out. But after the publication of the Afghan war logs, Assange proposed to change the terms of the deal once again, before the planned launch of the much bigger tranche of Iraq logs. He wanted more television, in order to provide “emotional impact”. He had by now made some new friends in London – Ahmad Ibrahim, from the Qatari-funded Al Jazeera, and Gavin MacFadyen from City University in London. MacFadyen, a veteran of
World in Action
, one of Britain’s most distinguished investigative TV series in the 1970s, had recently helped set up an independent production company based at the university. Called the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, it was funded by the David and Elaine Potter Foundation. Elaine had been a reporter during
the great days of London’s
Sunday Times
, and her husband David had made millions from the development of the Psion computer. There was a distinct prospect that the wealthy Potter Foundation might become patrons of WikiLeaks: the Florentine Medicis, as it were, to Assange’s Michelangelo. Rapidly, the “Bureau” was drawn into Assange’s new plans.

He demanded that print publication of the Iraq war logs be postponed for at least another six weeks. This would enable the Bureau, under Assange’s guidance, to sell a TV documentary to Channel 4’s well-regarded
Dispatches
series. The Bureau would also make and sell a second documentary, of a more wide-ranging nature, to be aired on both Al Jazeera’s Arabic and English-language channels, which could be guaranteed to cause uproar in the Middle East. Both documentaries eventually got made, and Assange sensibly hired a respected NGO, Iraq Body Count, to analyse the casualty figures for the TV productions.

The fledgling Bureau, headed by former TV journalist Iain Overton, unsuccessfully attempted to make further lucrative sales to TV channels in the US. Overton then exasperated his unenthusiastic print partners by giving an on-the-record interview to Mark Hosenball of
Newsweek
, betraying in advance the entire top-secret plan to publish the Iraq war logs.

“Exclusive: WikiLeaks Collaborating With Media Outlets on Release of Iraq Documents”, ran the headline above the article, which opened: “A London-based journalism nonprofit is working with the WikiLeaks website and TV and print media in several countries on programmes and stories based on what is described as a massive cache of classified US military field reports related to the Iraq war … The material is the ‘biggest leak of military intelligence’ that has ever occurred, Overton says.”

Assange’s side deal with the Qataris also angered the original partners. Al Jazeera English was to break the agreed embargo for simultaneous publication by almost an hour, leaving the other
media organisations scrambling to catch up on their websites. Leigh found it hard to disagree with Eric Schmitt of the
New York Times
when he protested that Assange seemed to be doing media deals with “riff-raff”. The founder of WikiLeaks had been rocketed to the status of a huge celebrity, in large part thanks to the credibility bestowed on him by three of the world’s major news organisations. But was he going out of control?

Leigh tried his best not to fall out with this Australian impresario, who was prone to criticise what he called the “snaky Brits”. Instead, Leigh used his ever-shifting demands as a negotiating lever. “You want us to postpone the Iraq logs’ publication so you can get some TV,” he said. “We could refuse, and simply go ahead with publication as planned. If you want us to do something for you, then you’ve got to do something for us as well.” He asked Assange to stop procrastinating, and hand over the biggest trove of all: the cables. Assange said, “I could give you half of them, covering the first 50% of the period.”

Leigh refused. All or nothing, he said. “What happens if you end up in an orange jump-suit en route to Guantánamo before you can release the full files?” In return he would give Assange a promise to keep the cables secure, and not to publish them until the time came. Assange had always been vague about timing: he generally indicated, however, that October would be a suitable date. He believed the US army’s charges against the imprisoned soldier Bradley Manning would have crystallised by then, and publication could not make his fate any worse. He also said, echoing Leigh’s gallows humour: “I’m going to need to be safe in Cuba first!”

Eventually, Assange capitulated. Late at night, after a two-hour debate, he started the process on one of his little netbooks that would enable Leigh to download the entire tranche of cables. The
Guardian
journalist had to set up the PGP encryption system on his laptop at home across the other side of London. Then he could feed in a password. Assange wrote down on a scrap of paper:

ACollectionOfHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#
. “That’s the password,” he said. “But you have to add one extra word when you type it in. You have to put in the word ‘Diplomatic’ before the word ‘History’. Can you remember that?”

“I can remember that.”

Leigh set off home, and successfully installed the PGP software. He typed in the lengthy password, and was gratified to be able to download a huge file from Assange’s temporary website. Then he realized it was zipped up – compressed using a format called 7z which he had never heard of, and couldn’t understand. He got back in his car and drove through the deserted London streets in the small hours, to Assange’s headquarters in Southwick Mews. Assange smiled a little pityingly, and unzipped it for him.

Now, isolated up in the Highlands, with hares and buzzards for company, Leigh felt safe enough to work steadily through the dangerous contents of the memory stick. Obviously, there was no way he, or any other human, could read through a quarter of a million cables. Cut off from the
Guardian
’s own network, he was unable to have the material turned into a searchable database. Nor could he call up such a monolithic file on his laptop and search through it in the normal simple-minded journalistic way, as a word processor document or something similar: it was just too big.

Harold Frayman, the
Guardian
’s technical expert, was there to rescue him. Before Leigh left town, he sawed the material into 87 chunks, each just about small enough to call up and read separately. Then he explained how Leigh could use a simple program called TextWrangler to search for key words or phrases through all the separate files simultaneously, and present the results in a user-friendly form.

Leigh was in business. He quickly learned that although the cables often contained discursive free-text essays on local politics, their headers were always assembled in a rigid format. In fact, the state department posted on its own website an unclassified
telecommunications handbook which instructed its cipher clerks exactly what to do and how to do it, every time.

So, to type in, for example, “FM AMEMBASSY TUNIS” could be guaranteed to fetch up a list of each dispatch sent back to Washington from the American embassy in the capital of Tunisia. Similarly, the dispatches always signed off with the uppercase surname of the ambassador in post at the time. So the legend TUTTLE would fetch every cable during the ambassadorship of Robert Tuttle, George W Bush’s London envoy.

There were limits to the dossier’s contents. There was very little material prior to 2006 and the “Net-Centric Diplomacy” system had clearly been built up from some restricted pilot projects. So only a few embassies contributed material at first. Even the more up-to-date and voluminous dispatches were only a partial selection: many cables or sections that the state department could not bring themselves to share with other parts of the Washington military and bureaucratic forest were missing. Nevertheless, what the cables contained was an astonishing mountain of words, cataloguing the recent diplomacy of the world’s sole superpower in ways that no one in earlier decades could have even imagined.

Its sheer bulk was overwhelming. If the tiny memory stick containing the cables had been a set of printed texts, it would have made up a library containing more than 2,000 sizeable books. No human diplomats would have attempted to write so much down before the coming of the digital age: if written down, no human spy would have been able to purloin copies of that much paper without using a lorry, and no human mind would have been able subsequently to analyse it without spending half a lifetime at the task.

To be confronted with this set of data therefore represented a severe journalistic problem.

*

Leigh began his experiments by typing in the word “Megrahi”. He thought the name of the Libyan intelligence officer imprisoned for his part in the notorious 1988 Lockerbie plane bombing might be unusual enough to throw up relevant results. The Megrahi case was an ongoing diplomatic altercation involving the Americans, the Libyans, the British, the Scottish and – as it transpired – even the Qataris. Against US wishes, Megrahi had been released from a UK prison in August 2009, supposedly on compassionate grounds because he was on the brink of death from prostate cancer. A year later, he was still alive, after receiving a hero’s welcome back in Tripoli. That much was known to the outside world, and conspiracy theories abounded. Was there now a way of uncovering the insider truth?

The TextWrangler software took barely two minutes to throw up and itemise no fewer than 451 appearances of the word Megrahi in US dispatches. Taken together, the picture they painted was certainly different from the one officially fed to the British public at the time. The first cable up on the screen was from Richard LeBaron, the charge d’affaires in London, dated 24 October 2008. Marked “PRIORITY” for both the secretary of state in Washington and also the department of justice, the cable was classified “CONFIDENTIAL//NOFORN”. It began, “Convicted Pam Am 103 bomber Abdelbasset al-Megrahi has inoperable, incurable cancer, but it is not clear how long he has to live.”

A succession of cables then charted growing pressure – described as “thuggish” – heaped on the British by Libya. Viewed sidelong from a US perspective, the dilemma for their junior ally in London was clear, and even evoked some sympathy. The American public was going to be furious if the ailing Megrahi was let out too soon: many US citizens had died on the bombed plane, and Megrahi was the only Libyan who had ever received any kind of punishment for the atrocity.