WikiLeaks (27 page)

The letter ordered WikiLeaks to halt plans to publish the cables, hand back the stolen files, and “destroy all records of this material from WikiLeaks’ databases.”

Assange wrote to Susman again on 28 November. He made clear that WikiLeaks had no intention of putting anybody at risk, “nor do we wish to harm the national security of the United States”. He continued: “I understand that the United States government would prefer not to have the information that will be published in the public domain and is not in favour of openness. That said, either there is a risk or there is not. You have chosen to respond in a manner which leads me to conclude that the risks are entirely fanciful and that you are instead concerned only to suppress evidence of human rights abuses and other criminal behaviour.”

The negotiations with the state department – such as they were – thus terminated. All that was left was to prepare for simultaneous publication of the biggest leak in the history. What could possibly go wrong?

Basel railway station, Switzerland
28 November 2010

“
Launch! Launch! Launch!
”
G
UARDIAN
NEWSROOM

It was Sunday morning at the sleepy Badischer Bahnhof. Few were around. The station sits precisely on the border between Germany and Switzerland. It is a textbook example of European co-operation – with the Germans providing the trains, and the Swiss running the cafés and newspaper kiosks. This morning, however, the station would become briefly notorious for something else: a gigantic foul-up.

Early in the morning, a van rolled in, bearing 40 copies of the German news magazine
Der Spiegel
. The weekly normally starts distributing copies to newsagents over the weekend, with revellers in Berlin able to buy it late on Saturday night on their way home. But on this occasion – as with the publication of the Afghan war logs –
Der Spiegel
was supposed to have held all copies of its edition back. The international release of the US embassy cables had been painstakingly co-ordinated for 21.30 GMT that Sunday evening. The
Guardian
,
New York Times
,
El País
and
Le Monde
were all waiting anxiously to push the button on the world’s biggest leak.
Der Spiegel
had agreed to roll its stories out at the same time on its website, with the magazine only published on the following Monday morning. Everyone knew the script.

But the gods of news had decided to do things differently. At around 11.30am Christian Heeb, the editor-in-chief of the local Radio Basel, discovered a copy of
Der Spiegel
at the station. It was dated 29/11/10. It cost €3.80. The front cover was nothing less than sensational: “Revealed: How America Sees the world”. The strap-line confirmed: “The secret dispatches of the US foreign ministry”. Against a red background was a photo-gallery of world leaders, each accompanied by a demeaning quotation culled from the US cables. Angela Merkel, Germany’s increasingly un popular chancellor, was “risk averse and rarely creative”. Guido Westerwelle, Merkel’s disastrous foreign minister, was “aggressive”. Then there were the others. Vladimir Putin? “Alpha dog”. Dmitry Medvedev? “Pale and hesitant”. Silvio Berlusconi? “Wild parties”. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? “Hitler”. Next to Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi were the tantalising words “Luxuriant blonde nurse”. More extraordinary revelations were promised inside.

Heeb’s station started to broadcast the news, saying a few early copies of
Der Spiegel
had become available at Basel station. It was at this point that an anonymous Twitter user called Freelancer_09 decided to check out the prospect for himself. He tweeted: “
Der Spiegel
zu früh am Badischen Bahnhof Basel! Mal schaun was da steht.” (
Der Spiegel
too early at Basel station! Let’s see what’s there.) Freelancer_09 managed to obtain one of the last two or three copies of the rogue
Spiegel
batch, just as panicked executives at the magazine’s Berlin headquarters were realising something had gone horribly wrong: one of the distribution vans sent to crisscross Germany had set off for Switzerland 24 hours too early.

Radio Basel in Switzerland received a hasty phone call from Germany. Would they come off the air in return for subsequent
help with the story? But it was too late. Freelancer_09 was already at work: within minutes he had begun tweeting the magazine’s contents. Merkel had a better relationship with US president George W Bush than with his successor Barack Obama! US diplomats have a low opinion of Germany’s regional politicians! The Americans think Westerwelle is a jerk! At the start of the morning Freelancer_09 had a meagre tally of 40 Twitter followers. His own political views seemed pretty clear – alternative, counter-cultural, even anarchist – judging from the leftist Twitter users he followed, and from his own profile photo: a child shouting through a loud-hailer above the words: “Police state”. Who he was exactly was uncertain. (His identity remained mysterious; some weeks later his Twitter account went dormant.)

Soon, word spread through the blogosphere that an anonymous local journalist in Basel had stumbled on the Holy Grail. Other German journalists started “retweeting” his posts.
Der Spiegel
frantically messaged him to make contact. He ignored them. “His Twitter follows rapidly snowballed. We could see it was becoming a serious problem,” admits
Der Spiegel
’s Holger Stark. “While we were closing the hole, he had managed to get a copy of the magazine.”

Sitting helplessly in London, Alan Rusbridger realised that the 9.30pm GMT embargo for the release of the cables looked wobbly. “You have five of the most powerful news organisations, and everything was paralysed by a little freelancer. We started having conferences on the hour wondering what to do,” Rusbridger says. There was more bad news. Rival German news organisations contacted Freelancer_09 and asked him to start scanning entire pages of Der Spiegel’s edition. By about 3pm, he had 150 followers, with more joining every minute. By 4pm he had found a scanner, and was pumping the embargoed articles out onto the internet. His followers jumped to around 600. A French mirror site began translating Freelancer_09’s posts. “We realised the story
wasn’t going to hold. We had sprung a leak ourselves,” Rusbridger recalls wryly. It was a great irony. Rusbridger had been an early Twitter proselytiser; he had relentlessly encouraged
Guardian
journalists to sign up to the San Francisco-based micro-blogging site. Now Twitter had turned round and – figuratively speaking – skewered him in the bottom.

The previous day, Saturday, at around 5pm a German technician from
Der Spiegel
’s own online service in Hamburg had made an earlier gaffe: he managed to go live on the website with an extract from the edition of the magazine. It gave a few intriguing early details: that there were 251,287 cables; that one cable dated back to 1966, but most were newer than 2004; that 9,005 documents dated from the first two months of 2010. Stark apologised for the accident and said the German link was erased as soon as it was discovered. The screen shots circulated through the net for some time. Then on Sunday afternoon more material appeared on
Spiegel
’s popular English-language site. The rumours were now sweeping feverishly across Twitter. The anticipation was reaching bursting point.

The
New York Times
soon spotted the
Spiegel
online story. The paper’s executives said the embargo was dead – now effectively meaningless. “What was so brilliant was the irony that of all the people to mess up it was the Germans,” said Katz – not always the
Guardian
’s most politically correct representative. Until now, it was the Germans – impeccably ethical at all times – who had managed to avoid the recriminations hurled freely by Assange at both the Americans and the British. Janine Gibson, editor of
guardian.co.uk
, the
Guardian
’s website, compared the pratfall-strewn cables launch to Britain’s 1993 Grand National. That shambolic instalment of the historic horse race was infamously cancelled after two false starts.

“It all got terribly untidy,” Rusbridger says. “But it was the most complicated thing we have ever done, co-ordinating a
Spanish morning paper with a French afternoon paper with a German weekly with an American [paper] in a different time zone and a bunch of anarchists in a bunker who would only communicate via Jabber [online instant messaging].”

By 6pm the
Guardian
and everyone else agreed just to publish, go with it. As though at Nasa’s Mission Control Center in Houston, the
Guardian
’s production staff stood poised at the newspaper’s King’s Cross office in front of a flickering bank of screens. Production boss Jon Casson asked: “Will we launch?” Katz replied: “LAUNCH!” The word was taken up and spread instantly across the back bench, the newsroom echoing with the words: “Launch! Launch! Launch!” The world’s biggest leak had gone live.

The
Guardian
’s front-page splash made the historic dimensions of the story clear. With David Leigh’s byline, it appeared on
guardian.co.uk
at 6.13pm. The headline proclaimed: “US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomatic crisis.” It began:

“The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the
Guardian
and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies, many sent as recently as February this year. At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables – many designated ‘secret’ – the
Guardian
can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN leadership.”

The story went on: “These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches, which were obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers’ website, also reveal Washington’s evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues.”

At 6.15pm the
Guardian
launched a WikiLeaks live blog, to chart reaction as it came in. More live blogs would follow; they would become an innovative part of the cables coverage. The
disclosures in Leigh’s story were the first of many over the next four weeks. Despite its scrappy launch, the publication of the US state department cables amounted to the biggest leak since 1971 when Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon papers to the
New York Times
, provoking a historic court case and revealing the White House’s dirty secrets in Vietnam. This data spillage was far bigger – an unprecedented release of secret information from the heart of the world’s only superpower.

Nobody could think of a bigger story – certainly not one authored by the media themselves. “You could say the World Trade Center was a bigger story, or the Iraq war. But in terms of a newspaper, where by the act of publication you unleash one story that is then talked about in every single corner of the globe, and you are the only people who have got it, and you release it each day, this was unique,” Rusbridger says.

The US state department had already assembled a team of 120 people, to burn the midnight oil and sift through those cables likely to be disclosed. The department also issued a condemnatory statement. It said: “We anticipate the release of what are claimed to be several hundred thousand classified state department cables on Sunday night that detail private diplomatic discussions with foreign governments. By its very nature, field reporting to Washington is candid and often incomplete information. It is not an expression of policy, nor does it always shape final policy decisions. Nevertheless, these cables could compromise private discussions with foreign governments and opposition leaders, and when the substance of private conversations is printed on the front pages of newspapers around the world, it can deeply impact not only on US foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world.” The release of the cables was a “reckless and dangerous action”. It had put lives at risk, the White House declared.

The statement was a damage limitation exercise. Even opponents of WikiLeaks had to acknowledge that some of the
disclosures – for example, that the US had spied on UN officials and sought to gather their credit card account numbers – were overwhelmingly in the public interest. The White House, moreover, frequently expressed concern when other authoritarian regimes clamped down on freedom of speech. This testy response when the leak came from inside its own large governmental machinery would provoke the Russians, Chinese, and just about everyone else, to accuse Washington of double standards.

The
Guardian
posted its own riposte. It pointed out that the paper had carefully redacted many cables. This was done “in order to protect a number of named sources and so as not to disclose certain details of special operations”.

The
New York Times
also vigorously defended its decision to publish: “The cables tell the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money. They shed light on the motivations – and, in some cases, the duplicity – of allies on the receiving end of American courtship and foreign aid. They illuminate the diplomacy surrounding two current wars and several countries, like Pakistan and Yemen, where American military involvement is growing. As daunting as it is to publish such material over official objections, it would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name.”