WikiLeaks (26 page)

Silvio Berlusconi was a case in point. The cables alleged that the controversial Italian prime minister had profited “personally and handsomely” from a close – the cables said too close – relationship with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister and former president. But might Berlusconi sue the
Guardian
in Rome, Phillips wondered? In the event, the Italian papers beat the
Guardian
to that one, and sprayed the detailed allegations all over the world.

There were further considerations. Responsible journalists normally approach the person they are writing about before publication, giving them the opportunity for comment or even rebuttal. In this case, however, there was a big danger in going too soon. That would reveal the
Guardian
possessed the cables: the other, alerted party could immediately seek an injunction, on the grounds that the paper was in unlawful possession of confidential documents. A sweeping UK gag order could be disastrous for the
Guardian
’s journalism: it might scupper their entire cables project.

Phillips, and Jan Thompson, the
Guardian
’s managing editor, held rambunctious meetings with the battle-scarred Leigh. His objective was to publish the best stories possible. The equally experienced lawyer’s task was to keep the paper out of the courts and the editor out of jail. Leigh proposed what he thought were ingenious solutions to libel problems. Sometimes the lawyer agreed. It was a very fine line. “We were incredibly careful legally,
and responsible,” Phillips says. But “legalling” the
Guardian
’s cable stories was “exhilarating”, she adds. “You got completely sucked in. Suddenly you find yourself becoming an expert on all the world’s governments.” Phillips felt confident in the end. She nevertheless arranged for both a QC and junior barrister to be on stand-by on the evening of the planned cables launch. Legal opponents had been known in the past to wake up British judges, fully prepared to issue gag orders against the
Guardian
, even in their pyjamas.

There was a final grand conference in London of all the parties on Thursday 11 November to fine-tune the elaborate publication grid of day-by-day cable stories. Assange arrived in the
Guardian
offices rigged out this time in chief executive style, with a sharp, well-fitting blue suit. His Australian lawyer Jennifer Robinson was by his side. Representatives from
Der Spiegel
,
El País
, and
Le Monde
had flown in, together with Ian Fisher, a deputy foreign editor with the
New York Times
. In contrast to the difficult atmosphere at the last meeting, Assange was a model of bonhomie and charm; Leigh, with whom he had previously had some angry words, decided to be absent with what some suspected to be a case of diplomatic flu. The meeting went surprisingly smoothly.

Afterwards, the partners again headed for dinner in the Rotunda restaurant beneath the
Guardian
offices. Here, as the journalists sank pints of Pilsner Urquell, Assange confided he was thinking about going to Russia. Russia was an odd choice – especially in the light of soon-to-be-published cables that described it as a “virtual mafia state”. He did not disclose, however, details of the relationship he had privately struck up with WikiLeaks’ new “Russian representative”, the bizarre figure of Israel Shamir.

How much did the US administration know of this planned challenge to their secrets? The journalists assumed the CIA had followed every twist and turn of the project. The US army had
certainly been aware that thousands of diplomatic cables had gone astray since the summer, when Private Bradley Manning had been specifically indicted for purloining them. But the Obama administration appeared remarkably unaware of just which cables WikiLeaks and its media partners now had in their possession.

In the week before publication, the state department warned many of its allies about the cables’ embarrassing contents. But they appeared not to know that the leaked cables ceased at the end of February, believing some to be more recent. Rumours circulated that Washington had been unimpressed with David Cameron and Britain’s new coalition government, which took power in May. The US ambassador in London, Louis B Susman, allegedly said as much in a post-election cable. The Americans, it was gathered, had now sheepishly briefed Downing Street about its contents. They were under the impression the leaked cables went up to June 2010, the month of Manning’s arrest.

The
Guardian
didn’t have that Cameron cable. As a result Cameron survived the WikiLeaks drama relatively unscathed. “We were amazed about how little the US knew about what we were doing,” Katz says. ‘They clearly had no idea which data set we had. They massively over-briefed about what was in the cables.”

The
New York Times
had decided to forewarn the state department which cables it was intending to use. The
Guardian
– which worked in Britain under a peculiarly oppressive legal regime – was not going to follow the Americans quite that far. The paper was willing to listen, but was already doing all it could, without official prompting, to protect sensitive human contacts from reprisal, and not to publish irresponsibly.

A few days before the cables’ release, two senior figures from the US embassy in Grosvenor Square called in to the
Guardian
’s London offices for a chat. This discussion led to a surreal transatlantic telephone call on Friday 26 November – two days before D-Day. Rusbridger had agreed to ring Washington. He made the
conference call from the circular table in his office. On the line in Washington was PJ Crowley, the US assistant secretary of state for public affairs. The conversation began:

“OK, here’s PJ Crowley. I just want you to know in this phone call we’ve got secretary of state Clinton’s private secretary, we have representatives of the DoD, the intelligence communities, and the National Security Council.”

All Rusbridger could offer in reply was, “We have our managing editor here …”

Crowley then set out how the cable scandal looked from the lofty heights of US power: “Obviously, from our perspective these are stolen documents. They reveal sensitive military secrets and addresses that expose people to security risks.”

Crowley made his pitch. He said the US government was “willing to help” the
Guardian
if the newspaper was prepared to “share the documents” it had – in other words, tip off the state department which cables it intended to publish. Rusbridger was non-committal. He said: “I don’t think we are going to agree on that now, so why don’t we return later to that.”

Crowley said some special forces operations and dealings with some countries were sensitive. He then asked for a pause. He came back a couple of minutes later: “Mr Rusbridger, we don’t feel this conversation is working for us because at the moment we are just giving a lot of stories, and we are not getting a lot in return.”

Clinton’s private secretary chipped in. She said: “I’ve got a very direct question for you, Mr Rusbridger. You journalists like asking direct questions and I know you expect direct answers. So I’m going to ask you a direct question. Are you going to give us the numbers of the cables or not?”

“No, we’re not.”

“Thank you very much.”

Rusbridger did decide to tell the Americans the
Guardian
’s broad publication schedule. Day one, he said was to feature Iran,
with North Korea on day two and Pakistan on day three. Then the conversation was over.

In Germany, the editor-in-chief of
Der Spiegel
had taken a call from the US ambassador. He told Georg Mascolo that there was huge concern at the “highest, highest levels” about the security of sources: “Lives could be in jeopardy.” Mascolo replied that
Der Spiegel
had done everything it could to protect sources who might be in danger. He invited the state department to share with him their areas of concern.

The
New York Times
had been holding its own sometimes tense negotiations with US government officials. The paper’s lawyers were confident that it could report on the secret documents without violating American law. But Bill Keller felt a large moral and ethical responsibility to use the material responsibly: “While we assumed we had little or no ability to influence what WikiLeaks did, let alone what would happen once this material was loosed in the echo chamber of the blogosphere, that did not free us from the obligation to exercise care in our own journalism. From the beginning we determined that in our articles and in any documents we published from the secret archive we would excise material that could put lives at risk,” he wrote later.

The
New York Times
’s policy was to err on the side of caution. With the Afghan and Iraq war logs, the paper redacted names of all sources who had spoken to US soldiers and diplomats, and edited out details that might have revealed continuing intelligence-gathering operations or military tactics. But because of the range of the material and the hypersensitivities of diplomacy, the embassy cables were bound to be more explosive than the war logs, Keller considered.

Dean Baquet, the
New York Times
’s Washington bureau chief, gave the White House an early warning on 19 November. Five days later, the day before Thanksgiving, Baquet and three colleagues were invited to a windowless room in the state department, where
they encountered an unsmiling crowd: representatives of the White House, the state department, the director of national intelligence, the CIA, the Defence Intelligence Agency, the FBI and the Pentagon, gathered around a conference table. Others, who never identified themselves, lined the walls. A solitary note-taker tapped away on a computer.

The meeting was off the record, but it is fair to say the mood was tense. Scott Shane, one of the reporters who participated in the meeting, described “an undertone of suppressed outrage and frustration”. Subsequent meetings and daily conference calls were less prickly and more businesslike, Keller says. The US administration had three areas generally of concern. It wanted to protect individuals who had spoken candidly to US diplomats in oppressive countries – something the
New York Times
was happy to do. It also wanted to remove references to secret American programmes relating to intelligence. Lastly, it did not want the paper to reveal candid remarks by heads of state and other top foreign officials, and feared publication would strain relations with those countries. “We were mostly unpersuaded,” Keller recalls.

This was, of course, hardly the first time the
New York Times
had published secrets that discomfited the US government. Before the year of WikiLeaks, nothing the paper had done on Keller’s watch had caused quite the agitation of two articles the paper published about tactics employed by the Bush administration after the attacks of 11 September 2001. One article, which was published in 2005 and won a Pulitzer prize, revealed that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping on domestic phone and email conversations without the legal courtesy of a warrant. The other, published in 2006, described a vast treasury department programme to screen international banking records.

The editor had vivid memories of sitting in the Oval Office as President George W Bush tried to persuade him and the
New York Times
’s publisher to withhold the eavesdropping article. Bush told
him that if the paper published, it should share the blame for the next terrorist attack. Unconvinced, the paper published anyway, and the reaction from the government and conservative commentators in particular was vociferous.

This time around, the US administration reaction was different. It was, for the most part, sober and professional. The Obama White House, while strongly condemning WikiLeaks for making the documents public, did not seek an injunction to halt publication. There was no Oval Office lecture, no plea to Keller or the publisher not to write about the documents. “On the contrary, in our discussions before the publication of our articles, White House officials, while challenging some of the conclusions we drew from the material, thanked us for handling the documents with care. The secretaries of state and defence and the attorney general resisted the opportunity for a crowd-pleasing orgy of press-bashing,” Keller says, adding: “Though the release of these documents was certainly painfully embarrassing, the relevant government agencies actually engaged with us in an attempt to prevent the release of material genuinely damaging to innocent individuals or the national interest.”

From his secret hideout back in Ellingham Hall, Assange sought to open his own channel of negotiations, sending a letter on 26 November to the US embassy in London. Headed “Julian Assange, editor-in-chief, WikiLeaks”, it began: “Dear Ambassador Susman, I refer to recent public statements by United States government officials expressing concern about the possible publication by WikiLeaks and other media organisations of information allegedly derived from United States government records.”

Assange invited the US government to “privately nominate” examples where publication of a cable could put an individual “at significant risk of harm”. He promised WikiLeaks would quickly consider any US government submissions ahead of publication. The state department’s legal adviser Harold Koh sent an
uncompromising letter back. It stated that the cables “were provided in violation of US law and without regard for the grave consequences of this action”.

Releasing them “would place at risk the lives of countless individuals”, jeopardise ongoing military operations, and threaten co-operation between the US and its allies and partners, the letter said. It would hinder co-operation on “common challenges such as terrorism, pandemic diseases and nuclear proliferation”.