Part 15 (2/2)

Ian: In an encrypted chatroom.

elise: No phone contact?

Ian: As you know, he doesn't take phone calls, but you can call some people that have some sort of contact with WikiLeaks people.

elise: In Sweden, in Iceland or here?

Ian: Well, Kristinn, you can get on the phone.

elise: Kristinn Hrafnsson? So he's involved?

Ian: Yes, he was, particularly when Julian was in jail. We were dealing with three or four different people.

elise: Who else?

Ian: I'm reluctant to identify them because I think they may not wish to be identified, but there were two younger volunteers at WikiLeaks who were looking after the production process. So there was a system that they built where we uploaded our redacted doc.u.ments and then automatically published them onto WikiLeaks, and that's how we ensured that the versions they used were the versions that we had pa.s.sed.

Obviously, the people who ran that process we had to talk to the whole time to say, 'Ignore that version. We're sending a new version,' and there's another young journalist there who we talked to, plus Stephens [Mark Stephens, a.s.sange's British lawyer]. There were four or five people that we were talking to. Obviously, a.s.sange himself was out of the picture for quite a while.

elise: Did a.s.sange come here? How many times?

Ian: Well, he came to two big meetings with the partners and he was in and out of the office quite a bit over the last year, four or five times.

elise: Just by himself or with someone else?

Ian: It depends. For these big meetings-the one meeting that Sarah Ellison wrote about, he came with his lawyers and his sort of lieutenant, Kristinn. Other times he came by himself. It was a very relaxed collaboration really.

elise: Could you talk to me about him, the man?

Ian: He's a very charismatic figure. He does have a way of sort of very quietly becoming the center of attention in the room. He's a very quiet, magnetic presence. He is clearly highly intelligent but quite emotionally unintelligent. I think he doesn't always read situations brilliantly. His a.n.a.lytical mind is extraordinary. He's very sharp.

You feel like you're sitting with a chess player. He's three moves ahead and very good at gaming a situation and trying to work out where he's trying to end up. He's quite thin-skinned. He doesn't deal with criticism well. He tends to be sort of slightly paranoid about what lies behind things, which may be completely innocent, but he's a very admirable figure in many ways.

He is not remotely materialistic. He has no possessions that I know of at all beyond a few laptops. He barely owns any clothes. He is really motivated by getting his material out there and through most of our conversations that was the primary drive for him, how best to get this material into the public domain and make the most impact with it. Not just dumping it, but getting it noticed.

elise: Did you talk about other things?

Ian: I don't think he's ever asked me anything. He's not a great question asker. He is very focused. You feel he's absolutely sort of laser-like.

He is a monomaniac in that sense. I think he sees an organization like The Guardian and asks very much in terms of what use we are to him and how we can suit his grander purpose.

The partners.h.i.+p continued in October 2010, with a second wave. This time WikiLeaks and its British, American and German partners revealed secret doc.u.ments on the war in Iraq: the Iraq War Logs, which began to leak on October 22 of the same year.

The big media buzz started in November. After having experimented with their alliance and after the first two deliveries, Julian dealt a big blow: 250,000 American diplomatic cables. Operation 'Cablegate' was launched on November 28 2010 and it made a lot of noise.

At that moment WikiLeaks' leader wanted to expand their impact. ”He wanted something bigger with more options,” Ian Traynor said. French daily Le Monde and Spanish magazine El Pais joined in.

The alliance, now with five partners, exposed 250,000 secret doc.u.ments from American emba.s.sies, revealing the underside of American diplomacy.

While the first leaks on Afghanistan contained few significant revelations and those from Iraq mostly focused on exactions committed between different Iraqi factions, the third and final hit would leave permanent traces.

Since May of 2010 Was.h.i.+ngton has been worried. Strengthened by the actions of five partners, WikiLeaks dropped a bomb by revealing information concerning Iran, terrorism, Israel and Guantanamo, among others. The viewpoint of the United States was partially revealed, and chaos ensued on the international scene. Diplomats had probably realized that they could no longer do their jobs the same way anymore. The White House responded immediately by condemning the release as a 'reckless and dangerous act,' risking lives of thousands of diplomats and officials and endangering its relations.h.i.+p with friends and allies.

Bryan Whitman, spokesperson for the Pentagon, said that the Department of Defense had taken a series of measures to stop these kinds of incidents from happening in the future. The Pentagon condemned these reckless releases and announced a strengthening of network security of secret communications of the U.S. army.

The five newspapers ”exchanged a lot of information, a.n.a.lyses and expertise,” said Sylvie Kauffmann, Executive Editor of Le Monde.

One hundred twenty-five people of the five editorial boards worked inconspicuously day and night for several weeks. The publication of the memos started on Sunday night, November 28 2010 but due to the sheer amount of information, it was spread out over several days. The partners had agreed on a publis.h.i.+ng schedule and how to post the memos online. They were very careful in crossing out names or indications to protect people's ident.i.ty.

As for the veracity of the doc.u.ments, Ms. Kauffmann said: ”We have no specific reason to doubt their authenticity or believe that some of them are false. The U.S. State Department hasn't denied anything and hasn't claimed anything was false, so we have used our judgment as well: the memos we couldn't guarantee the validity of their content we put aside.”

All the memos supplied were reviewed by the partners and then put online by WikiLeaks. The organization accepted to work this way. And for the third time, it supplied the material for free.

What could we actually learn from these leaked doc.u.ments? Randomly going through them we could learn that, for example, Saudi donors are still the main backers of radical organizations like Al-Qaeda. In fact, several countries in the region like Qatar have only made minimal efforts to combat terrorism. We could also learn that since 2007 the United States has being trying to verify the illegal production of nuclear fuel in Pakistan. Efforts to check the activity of several reactors didn't produce any results. Pakistani officials rejected the visits of American experts, fearing a negative reaction of the public opinion; a public that is afraid of Was.h.i.+ngton controlling the national nuclear capacities. As for Guantanamo, emptying the prison is not an easy job. Was.h.i.+ngton wanted to put pressure on smaller countries so that they would welcome some liberated prisoners. It can still be read that U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates thought attacking Iran would only delay their nuclear capabilities for one to three years.

WikiLeaks continued to gradually drop its 'bombs,' a ”real 9/11 of world diplomacy,” according to the Iranian government.

American authorities have tried to suppress the devastating effects of world diplomacy by contacting its strategic allies, especially Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Israel, Turkey and France.

Javier Moreno at El Pais said, ”[N]ewspapers are not liable.”

The U.S. State Department and government acted like the main victims of these leaks. The Spanish Editor-in-chief believes that ”the main victims are the hundreds of people who went to the American emba.s.sies in the many countries over the past years and who have had breakfast and dinner with diplomats and American amba.s.sadors. These people gave their opinions freely, and more importantly, they fed important information to the American diplomacy machine.”

Moreno believes that the press has a great responsibility to citizens and society of transmitting truthful and important information so that they are able to make educated judgments on their government's policies. He feels that newspapers aren't around to hamper or avoid governments or authorities in general to be exposed to embarra.s.sing situations like those caused by 'Cablegate.'

”The fruitful alliance of new media with traditional media in operation War Logs shows that we're not witnessing a 'revolution of journalism,' which should replace a regime crushed by another, as gurus of the 'Internet revolution' are claiming. It's a hybridization of a young growth of new journalism, a mutant variation on the old tree trunk of traditional journalism. As Julian a.s.sange said himself, the War Logs are a partners.h.i.+p.”

In November 2010, militant libertarian news site WikiLeaks made its way into the flow of mainstream press: Julian's revelation of the world's greatest secrets is the only thing they talked about, quoted by all major international media and picked up by every television station in the world.

30.

A 180-DEGREE TURN.

In an alliance, people still fight over rational problems and compatibility issues because collaboration comes with its fair share of trouble. During the last six months of 2010, the relations between Julian a.s.sange, and the five mainstream media, experienced some stigmatized turbulence mostly between the WikiLeaks' Julian a.s.sange and The Guardian, and between Julian and The New York Times.

Journalist Sarah Ellison echoed this story in the February 2011 edition of Vanity Fair. After having met many parties involved in the matter, the American journalist revealed the story behind the headlines. In her article, The Man Who Spilled the Secrets1, she presented the confrontation between the traditional media that follows established principles and journalistic ethics, and a bunch of libertarians of a new type of information. A conflict between two cultures, Ellison provided an outsider's look at the rocky relations.h.i.+p between Julian a.s.sange and the partners of the alliance. A detailed report revealed a few new elements of an already strained partners.h.i.+p.

The first problem encountered in the alliance happened at the start of summer 2010, when a.s.sange went solo to approach German magazine Der Spiegel to include it in the partners.h.i.+p. During the collaboration it also appeared that the ethical approaches of the two groups were very different. Traditional media wanted to provide a context to what they published, while WikiLeaks wanted a more raw approach. David Leigh witnessed this style difference: ”We were starting from: 'Here's a doc.u.ment. How much of it shall we print? Whereas Julian's ideology was, 'I shall dump everything out and then you have to try and persuade me to cross a few things out.' We were coming at it from opposite poles.”

WikiLeaks colleagues had noticed that Julian became ”increasingly autocratic and dismissive.” The Guardian had noticed it as well.

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