WikiLeaks (14 page)

This unusual arrangement had seen Davies launch long-term investigations into a range of areas, including poverty in the UK, Britain’s education system, and police corruption. Davies’s challenging, in-depth journalism had made political waves and proved popular with readers.

“Alan, what do you know of this guy Bradley Manning?” Davies asked.

“Not much,” Rusbridger replied.

“Well, it’s the biggest story on the planet …”

Yes, Rusbridger agreed, “Go to Brussels.”

There was no transport to get Davies to Brussels in time for the press conference, however, so the editor suggested that Traynor, who was highly experienced and who was based in the city, should try to buttonhole Assange. Davies emailed Traynor that night:

“Bradley Manning, aged 22, is an American intelligence analyst who has been working at a US base outside Baghdad, where he had access to two closed communication networks. One carried traffic from US embassies all over the world, classified ‘secret’; the other carried traffic from US intelligence agencies, classified ‘top secret’. Manning decided he didn’t like what he saw and copied masses of it on to CDs.”

Davies explained his view that Manning then made a “good move and a bad move”. The good decision was to approach Assange; the bad one was apparently to blurt out what he had done to Lamo, “a lonesome American computer hacker”.

Davies asked Traynor to get to Assange’s lunchtime panel debate in the parliament building. “Longer term, it’s a question of trying to forge some kind of alliance so that, if and when Assange releases any of the material which Manning claims to have leaked, we are involved.”

Traynor successfully made contact with Assange’s colleague Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the next day in Brussels. He spotted her in a café with two male companions, including “a guy wearing a large Icelandic woolly jumper”. This turned out to be Assange, but Traynor – having never seen him before – failed to recognise him. “Otherwise I would have grabbed him!” Traynor only caught up with Assange himself at the European parliament event. The only
other British reporter there was a junior hack from BBC radio. But the room was full, and there were a number of foreign journalists – among them an Austrian television journalist who Traynor knew had a good nose for a story – so the
Guardian
correspondent acted swiftly to get Assange away from the crowd as the meeting ended.

They set off together into a warren of parliament corridors and talked privately for half an hour. Traynor thought Assange quiet, cautious and inscrutable. He was impressed by his intellect and quick wit – and though he sometimes found his gnomic answers evasive and hard to follow, “I liked him and I think he liked me.” Traynor was pleased to hear that the WikiLeaks founder presented himself as a big fan of the
Guardian
. He seemed keen to engage in a collaborative project with a newspaper which had progressive credentials. Assange revealed, significantly, that WikiLeaks was planning to dump “two million pages” of raw material on its website. Traynor asked what it was about. Assange replied simply: “It concerns war.” Assange gave Traynor his local Brussels cellphone number; they agreed to meet again the next day.

Davies was meanwhile anxiously lunching with Rusbridger at the ground-floor restaurant in Kings Place, the
Guardian
’s London headquarters, overlooking the moored houseboats on the Regent’s Canal. In the middle of their lunch, Traynor’s email arrived. It confirmed that Assange was willing to meet. That night Davies didn’t sleep: “I was too excited.” First thing next morning he was on the high-speed train from London St Pancras station, through the Channel tunnel and on to Brussels.

As his Eurostar carriage shot through the green Kent countryside, he formulated and reformulated his pitch. As he saw it, Assange was facing four separate lines of attack. The first was physical – that someone would beat him up or worse. The second was legal – that Washington would attempt to crush WikiLeaks in the courts. The third was technological – that the US or its proxies
would bring down the WikiLeaks website. The fourth and perhaps most worrisome possibility was a PR attack – that a sinister propaganda campaign would be launched, accusing Assange of collaborating with terrorists.

Davies also knew that Assange was disappointed at the reception of his original Apache video, single-handedly released in Washington. The story should have set off a global scandal; instead the narrative had flipped, with attention focused not on the murder of innocent Iraqis but on WikiLeaks itself.

There was another important concern. If the
Guardian
alone were to obtain and publish the diplomatic cables, the US embassy in London might seek to injunct the paper. The UK is home to some of the world’s most hostile media laws; it is regarded as something of a haven for dodgy oligarchs and other dubious “libel tourists”. What was needed, Davies felt, was a multi-jurisdictional alliance between traditional media outlets and WikiLeaks, possibly encompassing non-governmental organisations and others. If the material from the cables were published simultaneously in several countries, would this get round the threat of a British injunction? Davies opened his notebook. He wrote: “
New York Times/Washington Post/Le Monde
.” He added: “Politicians? NGOs? Other interested parties?” Maybe the
Guardian
could preview the leaked cables and select the best story angles. The
Guardian
and WikiLeaks would then pass these “media missiles” to other friendly publications. He liked that plan. But would Assange buy it?

Over in Brussels, Traynor was discovering, as many others had, that having Assange’s mobile number and actually being able to get in touch with him were two very different things. Fearing that the Australian had gone awol, Traynor headed for the Hotel Leopold on the Place Luxembourg, where Assange was staying, next to the European parliament. Traynor went up to his room and banged on the door. Assange eventually emerged and invited Traynor in. The room resembled that of a modern monk:
Assange’s worldly possessions apparently comprised a couple of rucksacks stuffed full of gadgets, three laptops, and a jumble of mobile phones and Sim cards. His wardrobe seemed to be a T-shirt, a jumper and a pair of jeans.

Assange was in mischievous good spirits. The former hacker told Traynor: “You guys at the
Guardian
, you have got to do something about your security. You have got to get your email secure and encrypted.”

“He knew the contents of the email I had sent to London,” Traynor said, somewhat amazed. “He was showing off, but also expressing concern.”

When Davies arrived in town, the two
Guardian
reporters repaired again to the Leopold. They dialled upstairs. Assange – apparently still on Australian time – had crashed out again. He finally appeared 15 minutes later. The three sat in the hotel’s covered courtyard café. It was 3.30pm; nobody else was around.

What followed was a six-hour conversation. It would result in an extraordinary, if sometimes strained, partnership between a mainstream newspaper and WikiLeaks – a new model of co-operation aimed at publishing the world’s biggest leak. A
Vanity Fair
feature subsequently called it a courtship between “one of the oldest newspapers in the world, with strict and established journalistic standards” and “one of the newest in a breed of online muckrakers”. The article’s American author, Sarah Ellison, wrote: “The
Guardian
, like other media outlets, would come to see Assange as someone to be handled with kid gloves, or perhaps latex ones – too alluring to ignore, too tainted to unequivocally embrace.”

The hopes of an accord risked derailment from the outset, however. Assange had already positioned himself as an ideological enemy of Davies, whose high-profile campaign to force Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid the
News of the World
to confront and stop its phone-hacking had previously been denounced by Assange as a
contemptible attempt by “sanctimonious handwringing … politicians and social elites” to claim a right to privacy. Assange had accused Davies of “a lack of journalistic solidarity” for criticising the
News of the World
– calling it merely “an opportunity to attack a journalistic and class rival”. Assange now failed to disguise a faint contempt for the MSM in general.

Assange nevertheless struck Davies as “very young, boyish, rather shy – and perfectly easy to deal with”. He drank orange juice. Delicately, Davies began setting out the options. He told Assange it was improbable anybody would attack him physically; that would be a global embarrassment for the US. Rather, Davies predicted, the US would launch a dirty information war, and accuse him of helping terrorists and endangering innocent lives. WikiLeaks’ response had to be that the world was entitled to know the truth about the murky US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We are going to put you on the moral high ground – so high that you’ll need an oxygen mask. You’ll be up there with Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa,” Davies told Assange. “They won’t be able to arrest you. Nor can they shut down your website.”

Assange was receptive. This wasn’t the first time WikiLeaks had worked with traditional news media, and Assange had decided it might be a good idea on this occasion to do so again. Then Assange revealed the scale of his cache. WikiLeaks had in fact obtained, he confided, logs detailing every single US military incident in the Afghanistan war. “Holy Moly!” remarked Davies. Not only that, Assange added, the website also had similar war logs from Iraq from March 2003. “Fuck!” exclaimed Davies.

But that wasn’t all. WikiLeaks was indeed in possession of the secret US state department cables from American diplomatic missions around the world. Fourthly and finally, he had files from enemy combatant review tribunals held in Guantánamo Bay, the US’s notorious penal colony in Cuba. In all, jaw-droppingly, there were more than a million documents.

This was stunning stuff. Davies proposed that the
Guardian
should be allowed to preview all the material, bringing context to what would otherwise be an incomprehensible mass data dump.

Assange said that WikiLeaks had been ready to post all the data for the past two weeks, but he was hesitating because, although he would never reveal whether Manning was a source, he was worried about the legal implications for the young soldier. The Army had still not charged Manning; Manning would have been trained to resist interrogation, he believed, and Lamo’s allegations were evidentially “not credible”; but Assange was concerned that publishing the leaked material might give Pentagon investigators further evidence to work on.

Davies and Assange discussed adding the
New York Times
as a partner. There was no way, Davies argued, that the Obama administration would attack the most powerful Democrat-leaning newspaper in the US. Any WikiLeaks stories in the paper would enjoy the protection of the free speech provisions of the first amendment to the US constitution; furthermore, there was the precedent of the
New York Times
’s historic battle to gain the right to publish the Pentagon papers. The paper’s domestic US status would also make it harder for the authorities to press espionage charges against Manning, which might follow from purely foreign publication. Assange agreed with this.

Ian Traynor recalls: “Assange knew people at the
New York Times
. He was concerned that the stuff should be published in the US and not only abroad. He felt he would be more vulnerable if it was only published abroad.”

Assange also insisted that, in any deal, the
Times
in New York should publish five minutes ahead of the
Guardian
in London. He theorised that this would reduce the risk of Manning being indicted for breaking the Espionage Act. Traynor suggested the possibility of additionally bringing on board
Der Spiegel
in Berlin.
The German news magazine had lots of money, and Germany was itself embroiled militarily in Afghanistan, he pointed out.

Assange said that if the Big Leak were to go ahead, he would want to control the
Guardian
’s timing: he didn’t want to publish too soon if this would damage Manning, but he was also prepared to post everything immediately if there was any kind of attack on WikiLeaks.

At one point, the would-be partners went out to refuel at an Italian restaurant. As he ate, Assange scanned nervously over his shoulder to see if he was being watched. (There were no US agents there, as far as anyone could tell – only the European Green leader and former student rebel Daniel Cohn-Bendit sitting just behind them.) Assange cautioned that, if the deal were to go ahead, the
Guardian
would have to raise its game on security and adopt stringent measures. The paper had to assume phones were bugged, emails read, computers compromised, he said. “He was very, very hot on security,” Davies recalled. And he seemed media-savvy, too. “He suggested that we find a suitable story to give to Fox News, so that they would be brought on side rather than becoming attack dogs. Another good idea. We were motoring.”

Assange popped back to his room, returning with a small black laptop. He showed Davies actual samples from the Afghan database. The WikiLeaks team had examined the data, he said, encouragingly. They had discovered that the killing had gone on at a much higher rate in Iraq than in Afghanistan. But the database samples themselves seemed vast, confusing and impossible to navigate – an impenetrable forest of military jargon. Davies, by this point exhausted after a long day, began to wonder whether they in fact included anything journalistically of value.