Julian Assange - WikiLeaks (31 page)

On Tuesday, June 22 2010, Nick Davies arrived at Brussels-South train station. He took a taxi that drove him directly to the Hotel Leopold, a four-star hotel just down the street from the European Parliament where the conference hosts were staying.

Davies arrived with a strange proposal in his suitcase. On the train taking him to Brussels, he had already talked to Julian on the phone. He claimed that the material WikiLeaks had possession of would have more of an impact if it were well-researched and made into stories by major players of the mainstream press.

It was around 2 p.m. Julian Assange, Nick Davies and Ian Traynor were at the Leopold. The hotel was practically empty and everything was calm at the beginning of the afternoon. They set up in the Italian garden. The place was empty. Their conversation lasted for six hours.

At the end of the afternoon, the men were still at the table at the Leopold, on the brightly lit half-open terrace under a blue sky. The glass roof above their heads was entirely open and let in lots of sunlight. Davies and Assange launched the premises of
their collaboration. Traynor observed and listened. The two men prepared a secret password and wrote it down on a paper napkin.

Nick Davies explained: “Julian hooked together various words in the commercial logo on the napkin to create one long password. He also wrote the letters GPG in the top left-hand corner – that's some kind of encryption program. The technical people at
The Guardian
needed to know that in order to decrypt the material. I won't tell you the exact password, because Julian asked me not to, in case it assisted any police inquiry.”

At the beginning of the evening, a gentlemen's agreement was concluded: Davies convinced the Number One of WikiLeaks that sharing raw data with a news organization would increase the leaks' visibility more than just publishing them on the WikiLeaks site.

In London, Alan Rusbridger, Editor-in-Chief of
The Guardian
phoned Bill Keller of
The New York Times
and asked him mysteriously if he knew how to arrange a secure communication. “Not really,” he admitted. He explained that his paper didn't have encrypted phone lines. Keller then tried to speak to Rusbridger in an indirect, awkward way:

“In a roundabout way, he laid out an unusual proposition: an organization called WikiLeaks, a secretive cadre of anti-secrecy vigilantes, had come into possession of a substantial amount of classified United States government communications. WikiLeaks's leader, Julian Assange, an eccentric former computer hacker of Australian birth and no fixed residence, offered
The Guardian
half a million military dispatches from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. There might be more after that, including an immense bundle of confidential diplomatic cables.
The Guardian
suggested—to increase the impact as well as to share the labor of handling such a trove—that
The New York Times
be invited to share this exclusive bounty. The source agreed. Was I interested? I was interested.”

Two days later, in London, the team of
The Guardian
downloaded the first installment of U.S. government secrets, which consisted of more than 90,000 field reports produced by U.S. military units fighting in Afghanistan from the WikiLeaks site. This site would
only exist for a few hours, enough time to download documents before disappearing into cyberspace.

American journalist Eric Schmitt of
The New York Times
in Washington hopped on a plane and flew to London to see the material for himself. Keller admitted:

“His main assignment is to get a sense of the material. Was it genuine? Was it of public interest? […] Schmitt would also meet the WikiLeaks leader, who was known to a few
Guardian
journalists but not to us. Schmitt's first call back to
The Times
was encouraging. There was no question in his mind that the Afghanistan dispatches were genuine. They were fascinating – a diary of a troubled war from the ground up. And there were intimations of more to come, especially classified cables from the entire constellation of American diplomatic outposts. WikiLeaks was holding those back for now, presumably to see how this venture with the establishment media worked out.”

The material was in fact authentic. It was decided then,
The New York Times
was on board. Julian, flexing his proprietary rights, contacted Marcel Rosenbach, Editor-in-chief of German publication
Der Spiegel
. Like Davies predicted, the leaks would have an enormous impact. Here is what he said in the
Huffington Post
, an American news site published exclusively online, on December 30 2010:

“I was the journalist who took it on himself back in June to track down Julian Assange and to persuade him not to post his latest collection of secrets on the WikiLeaks website but to hand them over to
The Guardian
and other news organizations. The publication of the Afghan and
Iraqi war logs and then the diplomatic cables all flowed from that initiative. I did that because I think journalists should tell the truth about important things without being frightened, for example, by the government of the most powerful state on the planet.”

The world of media is in the middle of a massive revolution! WikiLeaks allied itself with three major names in journalism: Britain's
Guardian
, America's
New York Times
and Germany's
Der Spiegel
, and they made an agreement vis-a-vis the biggest document leak in history. Julian Assange brought together these three heavy weights of the international press to give them the exclusive on his confidential documents.

Julian compared this leak – the most important in recent military history – to “opening the Stasi archives.” The Stasi was the official state security service of the German Democratic Republic, regarded as one of the most repressive secret police in the world.

In July 2010, with the 92,000 reports received on the War in Afghanistan, the three newspapers were faced with a dilemma: publish without checking the origin of these reports (as they would have done had they found them on their own) or let WikiLeaks release the documents on their site. In the end, they decided to play along. WikiLeaks' interest was clear: Julian surrounded himself with these three big players in order to create a buzz.

WikiLeaks' new partners have the human means to verify all the data and even give them some added value. Nick Davies explained to the French
Télérama
: “Our competencies in data
journalism have been essential in properly handling the subject. I think the reputation of honesty and independence of
The Guardian
is what helped. We chose the information we felt was the most interesting after verification. Moreover, it can't cause injury to anyone posted in Afghanistan.”

But according to Julian, this big media group created a magnetic effect for the site, which received significantly more submissions after the broadcast of
Collateral Murder
.

From the onset, this association of digital media experts and traditional journalists turned out to be more efficient than a normal editorial board. Nick Davies agrees: “There are good points for both methods. Without WikiLeaks, we wouldn't have any material. Without traditional news outlets, WikiLeaks could not make sense of its information and offer it a platform that would attract enough attention. Every one of us needs the other and everyone sees the benefits of working together.”

The alliance started in July 2010 and continued over the next few months. From July to November, an impressive number of secret documents were revealed. On July 25, the first phase kicked off with strategically leaking 92,000 confidential reports from the U.S. army on the war in Afghanistan, the
Afghanistan War Logs
.

The three media players presented the results of their respective investigations of the documents supplied by WikiLeaks, but they didn't work the same way:
The Guardian
chose cartography to highlight the most important facts,
The New York Times
opted to write a very long article, stating the entirety of the main points, while
Der Spiegel
went with a slideshow.

London – Tuesday, January 18 2011. Kings Place, 90 York Way: Meeting with Ian Katz.

Ian Katz is the Deputy Editor of the
Guardian
, which he joined in 1990. He also worked as a reporter for said newspaper.

Ian Katz
: There were lots of small train crashes, one could say. On the day before publication,
Der Spiegel
accidentally distributed about forty or fifty copies to Basel, and they went on sale at the Basel train station. A local radio station bought one and started reading it on air, and then a freelance journalist got one and started Tweeting it. So we were all sitting here watching Twitter as he was tweeting through
Der Spiegel
magazine thinking, ‘Do we need to publish early? Do we need to bring it forward?'

We were having conference calls every hour saying, ‘He's got a hundred followers on Twitter now. Is anyone else following him?' All of us were obsessively reading the German Twitter-sphere, and in the end, we had to publish slightly early because of that. We had a number of quite tricky things around documents that would pop up somewhere else because some of the cables found their way into the public domain through different routes.

WikiLeaks published one or two themselves. A cable we wanted to publish the next day has just popped up and we would have to suddenly publish now. Then we'd have a frantic ringing round. We'd have
The New York Times
saying: ‘No, you can't do that now because we're doing it tomorrow,' and
Le Monde
would say: ‘We have to do it now because it's out there.'

So we had a few of those incidents, but nothing huge. One of the trickiest aspects of the collaboration was that, as you know, we wrote all the cables to protect sources very carefully, so we had a very complex process where each reporter who was working on a story wrote their own cables. Then it went through a person who was just looking at cables, a senior production editor here, and he did it again.

Then he spoke with his opposite members at the other papers such as
Der Spiegel
and
The New York Times
to say: ‘How are you writing this document? We're taking this, this and this out.' Then they would compare notes and settle on a final version, which we would give to WikiLeaks, which they would publish. That was an unbelievably labor-intensive process.

You can imagine. We did seven hundred seventy documents.
The New York Times
did a hundred and something. Each paper did several hundred, and each one of those, they had a discussion about. It was very labor intensive, but broadly, I think that was quite successful in that it meant we couldn't slip anything out that was dangerous.

I just had that sort of story up till publication, really, and then you would have seen kind of what happened next in terms of what we all printed. We had a grid for two weeks when we started and I think we produced a grid for another—I'm trying to remember now. No, we didn't produce a grid for another week, but what we agreed after the two weeks was that we would notify each other forty-eight hours before publication.

So if we found a story that we wanted to run, we would say that we were planning on running it on Thursday. Then if any of the others were interested we would share the cable information. In the third week, we all went in slightly different directions, but the agreement was still in place.