WikiLeaks (9 page)

The speculation was largely confirmed in 2010, when Assange gave Raffi Khatchadourian access to write a profile. The
New
Yorker
staffer wrote: “One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments’ information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site’s foundation, and Assange was able to say, ‘We have received over one million documents from 13 countries.’ In December, 2006, WikiLeaks posted its first document: a ‘secret decision’, signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union, that had been culled from traffic passing through the Tor network to China.”

The geeky hacker underground was only one part of the soil out of which WikiLeaks grew. Another was the anti-capitalist radicals – the community of environmental activists, human rights campaigners and political revolutionaries who make up what used to be known in the 1960s as the “counter-culture”. As Assange went public for the first time about WikiLeaks, he travelled to Nairobi in Kenya to set out their stall at the World Social Forum in January 2007. This was a radical parody of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, where rich and influential people gather to talk about money. The WSF, which originated in Brazil, was intended, by contrast, to be where poor and powerless people would gather to talk about justice.

At the event, tens of thousands in Nairobi’s Freedom Park chanted, “Another world is possible!” Organisers were forced to waive entry fees after Nairobi slum dwellers staged a demonstration. The BBC reported that dozens of street children who had been begging for food invaded a five-star hotel tent and feasted on meals meant for sale at $7 a plate when many Kenyans lived on $2 a day: “The hungry urchins were joined by other participants who complained that the food was too expensive and police, caught
unawares, were unable to stop the free-for-all that saw the food containers swept clean.”

Assange himself spent four days in a WSF tent with his three friends, giving talks, handing out flyers and making connections. He was so exhilarated by what he called “the world’s biggest NGO beach party” that he stayed on for much of the next two years in a Nairobi compound with activists from Médecins Sans Frontières and other foreign groups.

“I was introduced to senior people in journalism, in human rights very quickly,” he told an Australian interviewer later. “[Kenya] has got extraordinary opportunities for reforms. It had a revolution in the 1970s. It has only been a democracy since 2004.” He wrote that he met in Africa “many committed and courageous individuals – banned opposition groups, corruption investigators, unions, fearless press and clergy”. These brave people seemed like the real deal to him: his mail-out contrasted them witheringly with western fellow-travellers. “A substantial portion of Social Forum types are ineffectual pansies who specialise in making movies about themselves and throwing ‘dialogue’ parties for their friends with foundation money. They … love cameras.”

Assange cast himself in contrast to these people, as a man of courage. He invoked one of his personal heroes in that WikiLeaks mail-out: “This quote from Solzhenitsyn is increasingly germane: ‘A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the west today. The western world has lost its civic courage … Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites.’” Assange would often pronounce to those around him: “Courage is infectious.”

It was Kenya that gave WikiLeaks its first journalistic coup. A massive report about the alleged corruption of former president Daniel Arap Moi had been commissioned from the private
inquiry firm Kroll. But his successor, President Mwai Kibaki, who commissioned the report, subsequently failed to release it, allegedly for political reasons. “This report was the holy grail of Kenyan journalism,” Assange later said. “I went there in 2007 and got hold of it.”

The actual circumstances of publication were more complex. The report was leaked to Mwalimu Mati, head of Mars Group Kenya, an anti-corruption group. “Someone dumped it in our laps,” he says. Mati, prompted by a contact in Germany, had previously registered as a volunteer with WikiLeaks. The fear of retribution made it too dangerous to post the report on the group’s own website: “So we thought: can we not put it on WikiLeaks?” The story appeared simultaneously on 31 August on the front page of the
Guardian
in London. The full text of the document was posted on WikiLeaks’ website headed, “The missing Kenyan billions”. A press release explained, “WikiLeaks has not yet publicly ‘launched’. We are open only to submissions from journalistic and dissident contacts. However, given the political situation in Kenya we feel we would be remiss to withhold this document any longer.” The site added: “Attribution should be to … ‘Julian A, WikiLeaks’ spokesman’.”

The result was indeed sensational. There was uproar, and Assange was later to claim that voting shifted 10% in the subsequent Kenyan elections. The following year, his site ran a highly praised report on Kenyan death squads, “The Cry of Blood – Extra-Judicial Killings and Disappearances”. It was based on evidence obtained by the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights. Four people associated with investigating the killings were themselves subsequently murdered, including human rights activists Oscar Kingara and John Paul Oulu.

Assange was invited to London to receive an award from the human rights organisation Amnesty: it was a moment of journalistic respectability. Characteristically, he arrived in town three hours
late after a convoluted series of flights from Nairobi which involved withholding his passport details from the authorities until the last minute. His acceptance speech was generous, if a little grandiose: “Through the courageous work of organisations such as the Oscar foundation, the KNHCR [Kenya National Commission on Human Rights], Mars Group Kenya and others we had the primary support we needed to expose these murders to the world. I know that they will not rest, and we will not rest, until justice is done.” Again, there was a symbiotic relationship with the MSM, the mainstream media: the Kenyan story only gained global traction when followed up by Jon Swain of the London
Sunday Times
.

A coda to the Kenya episode left a bad taste. In March 2009, journalist Michela Wrong published a book on corruption in the east African nation, called
It’s Our Turn to Eat
, which took her three years to write. Nairobi bookshops proved nervous about stocking it, but she was startled to find a pirated copy posted worldwide on WikiLeaks without consultation. “This was a violation of copyright, involving a commercial publication, a book not banned by any African government, not a secret document. It left me feeling pretty jaundiced.”

She wrote protesting: “I was delighted when WikiLeaks was launched, and benefited personally from its fearlessness in publishing leaked documents exposing venality in countries like Kenya. This strikes me as a totally different case.” In what she terms a “gratingly self-righteous” reply, WikiLeaks, who eventually agreed to take the book down, wrote: “We are not treating document as a leak; it has been treated as a censored work that must be injected into the Kenyan political sphere. We thought you … had leaked the PDF for promotional reasons. That said, the importance of the work in Kenya as an instrument of political struggle eclipses your individual involvement. It is your baby, and I’m sure it feels like that, but it is also its own adult – and Kenya’s son.”

*

Assange and his group were by now starting to see a flow of genuinely leaked documents, including some from UK military sources. Assange sought to market them. He wrote several times to the
Guardian
, calling himself the “editor” or the “investigative editor” of WikiLeaks, trying to get the paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, to take up his stories. He seemed unable to accept that sometimes his leaks might just not be that interesting – no, the lack of response was always due to a failure of nerve, or worse, on the part of the despised MSM.

In July 2008, for instance, he declared: “[Have] the
Guardian
and other UK press outlets lost their civic courage when dealing with the Official Secrets Act?” He was offering the media access to a leaked copy of the 2007 UK counter-insurgency manual, but no one had signed up to his proffered “embargo pool”: “I suggest the UK press has lost its way … Provided all are equally emasculated, all are equally profitable. It is time to break this cartel of timidity.”

Those who recalled his Melbourne dating-site entry would have been intrigued by his remark that running combative journalistic exposures as he did was also, in fact, an excellent way to get laid: “In Kenya, where we are used to newspaper raids and manageable arrests, we don’t care too much. These hamfisted attempts drive home the story that ignited them, sell newspapers, look good on the CV, and attract lovers like knighthoods.”

A further Assange experiment in media manipulation in 2008 saw him try to auction a cache of what were claimed to be thousands of emails from a speechwriter to Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. The winning bidder was to get exclusive access, for a time, to the documents. The auction was based on his theory that nobody took material seriously if it was provided free of charge. He pointed out: “
People
magazine notoriously paid over $10 [million] for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s baby photos.” Bafflingly, the minutiae of Venezuelan politics did not prove as saleable as celebrities’ baby pics: nobody bid.

Assange had by now discovered, to his chagrin, that simply posting long lists of raw and random documents on to a website failed to change the world. He brooded about the collapse of his original “crowd-sourcing” notion: “Our initial idea was, ‘Look at all those people editing Wikipedia. Look at all the junk that they’re working on … Surely all those people that are busy working on articles about history and mathematics and so on, and all those bloggers that are busy pontificating about … human rights disasters … surely
those
people will step forward, given fresh source material, and do something?’ No. It’s all bullshit. It’s
all
bullshit. In fact, people write about things, in general (if it’s not part of their career), because they want to display their values to their peers, who are already in the same group. Actually, they don’t give a fuck about the material.”

He carried on hunting vainly for a WikiLeaks model that could both bring in working revenue and gain global political attention. His published musings from that period are revealing: they show he saw the problem from the outside, but could not yet crack it:

“The big issue for WikiLeaks is first-rate source material going to waste, because we make supply unlimited, so news organisations, wrongly or rightly, refuse to ‘invest’ in analysis without additional incentives. The economics are counter-intuitive – temporarily restrict supply to increase uptake … a known paradox in economics. Given that WikiLeaks needs to restrict supply for a period to increase perceived value to the point that journalists will invest time to produce quality stories, the question arises as to which method should be employed to apportion material to those who are most likely to invest in it.”

There was only one, relatively limited, way in which the Assange model was beginning to gain the interest of the mainstream media: and that was by behaving not as the originally envisaged anonymous document dump, but as what he called “the publisher of last resort”. A fascinating clash between WikiLeaks
and a Swiss bank demonstrated that at least one of the key claims for Assange’s new stateless cyberstructure was true – it could laugh at lawyers.

Rudolf Elmer ran the Cayman Islands branch of the Julius Baer bank for eight years. After moving to Mauritius, and vainly trying to interest authorities in what he said was outrageous tax-dodging by some of his former employer’s clients, he contacted Assange to post his documents: “We built up contact over encrypted software and I received instructions on how to proceed … I wasn’t looking for anonymity.”

The fuming Zurich bankers then went to court in California to force WikiLeaks to take down the files, claiming “unlawful dissemination of stolen bank records and personal account information of its customers”. The bank won a preliminary skirmish when California-based domain name hosters Dynadot were ordered to disable access to the name “wikileaks.org”. But Baer very quickly lost the entire war: WikiLeaks retained access to other sites hosted in Belgium and elsewhere; many “mirror sites” sprang up carrying the offending documents; and the court ruling was reversed as a stream of US organisations rallied behind WikiLeaks in the name of free speech. They included the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as a journalistic alliance which included the Associated Press, Gannett News Service, and the
Los Angeles Times
.

The Swiss bank and its corrupt customers merely managed to shine more light on themselves, while WikiLeaks demonstrated that it was genuinely injunction-proof. It was WikiLeaks one, Julius Baer nil. Assange picked up another award in London from the free speech group Index on Censorship. One of the judges, poet Lemn Sissay, blogged about a typical piece of showmanship: “We did not know whether Julian Assange … was to turn up to accept. Thankfully he came, a tall, studious man with shock-blonde hair and pale skin. Seconds before stepping on
stage he whispered, ‘Someone may lunge at the stage to present me with a subpoena. I cannot allow them to do this, and shall leave if I see them.’”