WikiLeaks (24 page)

“OK, he wants a front-page rejoinder for the Burns piece and he also wants a guarantee that you’re not going to publish any more sleazy hit pieces on him.”

Keller let out a little snort. “He can write a letter,” he said curtly. “Strictly speaking, that’s not my department, but I’d certainly use any influence I had to suggest that it’s published. And – what was the second one? – er, you can certainly assure him we are not planning any sleazy hit pieces.”

Rusbridger returned to the room and conveyed Keller’s message. As he feared, Assange reacted furiously, saying this was not sufficient and, in terms, all bets were off. He announced that both the
New York Times
and
Guardian
themselves were now to be thrown out of the deal.

It was Georg Mascolo’s turn to speak – deliberately and firmly. The three papers were tied together. If Assange was cutting out the other two papers then
Der Spiegel
was out, too.

It was now nearly 1.30am. The discussion was going nowhere, so Rusbridger turned to Assange and summarised the position.

“As I see it you have three options. One, we reach no deal; two, you try and substitute the
Washington Post
for the
New York Times
; three, you do a deal with us three.

“One and Two don’t work because you’ve lost control of the material. That’s just going to result in chaos. So I can’t see that you have any option but Three. You’re going to have to continue with us. And that’s good. We have been good partners. We have treated the material responsibly. We’ve thrown huge resources at it. We’re good at working together, we like each other. We’ve communicated well with your lot. It’s gone well. Why on earth throw it away?”

If Assange was convinced, he wasn’t going to show it. Not that night, anyway. Rusbridger could see that doing it Assange’s way he would still be up for another few rounds before dawn. As
the WikiLeaks
capo di tutti capi
headed off coughing into the night, he shook hands with David Leigh, with whom he had previously worked so closely. Assange shot him a meaningful look and said in low, distinct tones: “Be careful.”

The next day Rusbridger sent Mark Stephens 10 bullet points to put to Assange:

•

 

Publish on Nov 29 in a staggered form.

•

 

Run over two weeks or more up to just before Xmas.

•

 

Exclusive to G, NYT, DS (plus El Pais and ? Le Monde).

•

 

Subject matter to be co-ordinated between partners and to stay off certain issues initially. No veto to anyone over subjects covered over whole course of series (post Jan). WL to publish cited documents at same time.

•

 

After Xmas the exclusivity continues for one more week, starting around Jan 3/4.

•

 

Thereafter WL will start to share stories on a regional basis among 40 serious newspapers around the world, who will be given access to “bags” of material relating to their own regions.

•

 

G to hire HB [Heather Brooke] on an exclusive basis.

•

 

If “critical” attack on WL they will release everything immediately.

•

 

If material is leaked to/shared with any other news organisation in breach of this understanding all bets are off.

•

 

If agreed the team will commence work on a grid of stories for the first phase.

Within 24 hours Stephens rang back to say Assange had okayed the deal. Whether or not it met Assange’s criteria for “a gentlemen’s agreement”, it was, anyway, an agreement.

*

Five of the world’s most reputable papers were now committed to selecting, redacting and publishing, on an unprecedented scale, the secret leaked diplomatic dispatches of a superpower. It was a project of astonishing boldness, which stood a chance of redefining journalism in the internet age. But while the newspapers laboured to behave responsibly, Assange continued to go his own way.

Disguising himself as an old woman, as detailed in Chapter 1, he moved operations to his rural hideaway at Ellingham Hall, out in the Norfolk countryside. There, his security over the cables, which he had once described as worth at least $5 million to any foreign intelligence agency, seemed less than watertight. Staff say that Assange handed over batches of them to foreign journalists, including someone who was simply introduced as “Adam”. “He seemed like a harmless old man,” said one staffer, “apart from his habit of standing too close and peering at what was written on your screen.” He was introduced as the father of Assange’s Swedish crony, the journalist Johannes Wahlstrom, and took away copies of cables from Russia and post-Soviet states. According to one insider, he also demanded copies of cables about “the Jews”.

This WikiLeaks associate was better known as Israel Shamir. Shamir claims to be a renegade Russian Jew, born in Novosibirsk, but currently adhering to the Greek Orthodox church. He is notorious for Holocaust-denying and publishing a string of anti-semitic articles. He caused controversy in the UK in 2005, at a parliamentary book launch hosted by Lord Ahmed, by claiming: “Jews … own, control and edit a big share of mass media.”

Internal WikiLeaks documents, seen by the
Guardian
, show Shamir was not only given cables, but he also invoiced WikiLeaks for €2,000, to be deposited in a Tallinn bank account, in thanks for “services rendered – journalism”. What services? He says: “What I did for WikiLeaks was to read and analyse the cables from Moscow.”

Shamir’s byline is on two previous articles pillorying the Swedish women who complained about Assange. On 27 August,
in
Counterpunch
, a small radical US publication, Shamir said Assange was framed by “Langley spies” and “crazy feminists”. He alleged there had been a “honeytrap”. On 14 September, Shamir then attacked “castrating feminists and secret services”, writing that one of the women involved, who he deliberately named, had once discussed the Cuban opposition to Castro in a Swedish academic publication “connected with” someone with “CIA ties”.

Subsequently, Shamir appeared in Moscow. According to a reporter on the Russian paper
Kommersant
, he was offering to sell articles based on the cables for $10,000. He had already passed some over to the state-backed publication
Russian Reporter
. He travelled on to Belarus, ruled by the Soviet-style dictator Alexander Lukashenko, where he met regime officials. The Interfax agency reported that Shamir was WikiLeaks’ “Russian representative”, and had “confirmed the existence of the Belarus dossier”. According to him, WikiLeaks had several thousand “interesting” secret documents. Shamir then wrote a piece of grovelling pro-Lukashenko propaganda in
Counterpunch
, claiming “the people were happy, fully employed, and satisfied with their government.”

Assange himself subsequently maintained that he had only a “brief interaction” with Shamir: “WikiLeaks works with hundreds of journalists from different regions of the world. All are required to sign non-disclosure agreements and are generally only given limited review access to material relating to their region.”

One can only speculate about whose interests Shamir was serving by his various wild publications. Perhaps his own personal interests were always to the fore. But while the newspapers had hammered out a deal to handle the cables in a responsible fashion, Shamir’s backstairs antics certainly made WikiLeaks look rather less so.

El País
newspaper, Calle de Miguel Yuste, Madrid
14 November 2010

“
It was a fruit machine. You just had to hold your hat under there for long enough
”
A
LAN
R
USBRIDGER, THE
G
UARDIAN

Viewed on screen, the unkempt, silhouetted figures looked like hostages held in the basement of a terrorist group’s safehouse. One of the stubbly, subterranean figures moved closer to the camera. He held up a sheet of paper. Written on it was a mysterious six-digit number. A secret Swiss bank account, perhaps? A telephone number? Something to do with
The Da Vinci Code
?

The shadowy figures had not, in fact, been seized by some radical faction, but were a group of journalists from Spain’s
El País
newspaper. Nor was their note a ransom demand. It was the index reference of one of more than 250,000 cables. Since being invited to join the existing British-US-German consortium – or “tripartite alliance” as the
New York Times
’s Bill Keller dubbed it –
El País
had wasted no time in setting up its own underground research room.

The paper – and France’s
Le Monde
– had joined the WikiLeaks party late. They had only two weeks to go through the cables
before the D-day publication night. The
Guardian
had been in the luxurious position of having held the same material for several months.
El País
’s editor-in-chief, Javier Moreno, and executive Vicente Jiménez urgently summoned back to Madrid their foreign correspondents; sitting in the paper’s bunker, next to endless discarded coffee cups, they ploughed through the database.

The journalists may have been heartened to read that, according to a secret cable from US officials in Madrid dated 12 May 2008,
El País
was Spain’s “newspaper of record”. It was also, apparently, “normally pro-government”. But they also found sensational material: the US embassy in Madrid had tried to influence judges, the government and prosecutors in cases involving US citizens. One involved a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, another covered secret rendition flights in Spain, and another was about the murder of a Spanish journalist by US fire in Baghdad. They also discovered stories from all across Latin America: from Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela.

From the beginning, the papers had agreed to work collaboratively. They shared some discoveries from the cables and even circulated lists of possible stories. Assange later claimed in a Swedish TV documentary that it was he personally who was pulling the strings of the old-fashioned MSM. He said: “What is new is us enforcing co-operation between competitive organisations that would otherwise be rivals – to do the best by the story as opposed to simply doing the best by their own organisations.”

In reality, this was a co-operative technique that the
Guardian
, along with other international outlets, had long been building. The previous year, for example, the paper had successfully beaten off lawyers for the Trafigura company, who had dumped toxic waste, by working in concert with BBC TV’s
Newsnight
, with a Dutch paper,
Volkskrant
, and with the Norwegian TV channel NRK. The British arms giant BAE had also been brought to a $400m corruption settlement with the US department of justice,
following a campaign in which the
Guardian
co-operated with other TV and print media in countries from Sweden to Romania to Tanzania.

The most distinguished pioneer of this globalised form of investigation was probably Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington DC, who, a full decade earlier, organised a massive exposure of the British American Tobacco company’s collusion in cigarette smuggling, with simultaneous publication by media in Colombia, London and the US.

So the present five-way media consortium was not a new invention. It was – or would be if it actually worked – the culmination of a growing media trend. What made this trend possible was what also made it necessary: the technological growth of massive, near-instantaneous global communications. If media groups did not learn to work across borders on stories, the stories would leave them behind.

In the run-up to cable D-Day, Ian Katz, the deputy editor managing these complex relationships, held regular Skype chats with the
Guardian
’s multilingual counterparts. “They were hilarious conversations,” Katz recalls. The reason the Spaniards were holding up the number of a US state department cable to the Skype camera was security – it had been agreed that no sensitive mentions would be made over the phone or by email.

In Berlin, similarly, Marcel Rosenbach, from
Der Spiegel
, was the first to unearth a cable with the deceptively bland title: “National HUMINT Collection Directive on the United Nations.” In fact, it revealed the US state department (on behalf of the CIA) had ordered its diplomats to spy on senior UN officials and collect their “detailed biometric information”. They were also told to go after “credit card account numbers; frequent flyer account numbers; work schedules and other relevant biographical information”. The cable, number 219058, was geopolitical dynamite. Nobody else had spotted it. “Marcel had written down the
number. I could only see half of it. I had to tell him: ‘Left a bit, left a bit,’” Katz recalls.