Julian Assange - WikiLeaks (32 page)

The partnership continued in October 2010, with a second wave. This time WikiLeaks and its British, American and German partners revealed secret documents 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 País
joined in.

The alliance, now with five partners, exposed 250,000 secret documents from American embassies, 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 Washington 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 relationship 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, analyses 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 publishing schedule and how to post the memos online. They were very careful in crossing out names or indications to protect people's identity.

As for the veracity of the documents, 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 documents? 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 Washington controlling the national nuclear capacities. As for Guantanamo, emptying the prison is not an easy job. Washington 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 País
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 embassies in the many countries over the past years and who have had breakfast and dinner with diplomats and American ambassadors. 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 embarrassing 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 Assange said himself, the
War Logs
are a partnership.”

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.

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 Assange, and the five mainstream media, experienced some stigmatized turbulence mostly between the WikiLeaks' Julian Assange 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 Secrets
¹
, 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 relationship between Julian Assange and the partners of the alliance. A detailed report revealed a few new elements of an already strained partnership.

The first problem encountered in the alliance happened at the start of summer 2010, when Assange went solo to approach German magazine
Der Spiegel
to include it in the partnership. 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 document. 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.

The surprises continued when Julian wanted the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a British not-for-profit initiative backed by many journalists, to have access to the
Iraq War Logs
, which meant a delay in publishing the cables. Leigh accepted on condition that Julian would provide them with a new bunch of documents;
package three
containing the famous U.S. cables. Assange answered “
You can have package three tonight, but you have to give me a letter signed by
The Guardian
's editor saying you won't publish package three until I say so.
” Julian got the letter.

Then a new episode started, the one where
The Guardian
discovered that a former WikiLeaks volunteer leaked the content of
package three
to Heather Brooke, an independent journalist
and author who is currently fighting for freedom of information. And so David Leigh invited Brooke to join the
Guardian
team. He realized that by obtaining the database from a different source than Julian, the media partners didn't have to wait for the green light from Julian to publish. They shared the documents with
The New York Times
and
Der Spiegel
, and agreed to publish on November 8, 2010.

Seven days before that date, a furious Julian went to the London offices of
The Guardian
with his lawyer Mark Stephens. Julian burst in like a storm to the office of Editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, and threatened him with a lawsuit.

A meeting marathon was quickly improvised. At the table, the main protagonists: Rusbridger and Leigh of
The Guardian
, managers of
Der Spiegel
and along with Mark Stephens and Julian Assange, Kristin Hrafnsson was there. The atmosphere was tense. Ellison wrote in detail about this high-tension meeting: “Assange was pallid and sweaty, his thin frame racked by a cough that had been plaguing him for weeks. He was also angry, and his message was simple: he would sue the newspaper if it went ahead and published stories based on the quarter of a million documents that he had handed over to the
Guardian
just three months earlier…Rusbridger somehow kept all parties at the table—a process involving a great deal of coffee followed by a great deal of wine. Ultimately, he agreed to a further delay, allowing Assange time to bring in other media partners, this time France's
Le Monde
and Spain's
El País
.”

Le Monde
and
El País
joined in at the end of November 2010, to launch the third wave, the one that would make the most noise, divulging 250,000 telegrams of the U.S. diplomacy network.

The road was rough, but Rusbridger didn't regret any of it: “I think given the complexity of it all, touch wood, as I speak at
the moment, it is remarkable it has gone so well. Given all the tensions that were built into it, it would have been surprising to get out of it without some friction, but we negotiated it all quite well.”

Ian Katz, Deputy Editor of
The Guardian
recalls this rough patch.