Harding, Luke - WikiLeaks - Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

About the Book

It was the biggest leak in history. WikiLeaks infuriated the world’s greatest superpower, embarrassed the British royal family and helped cause a revolution in Africa. The man behind it was Julian Assange, one of the strangest figures ever to become a worldwide celebrity. Was he an internet messiah or a cyber-terrorist? Information freedom fighter or sex criminal? The debate would echo around the globe as US politicians called for his assassination.

Award-winning Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding have been at the centre of a unique publishing drama that involved the release of some 250,000 secret diplomatic cables and classified files from the Afghan and Iraq wars. At one point the platinum-haired hacker was hiding from the CIA in David Leigh’s London house. Now, together with the paper’s investigative reporting team, Leigh and Harding reveal the startling inside story of the man and the leak.

Inside Julian Assange’s

War on Secrecy

David Leigh and Luke Harding

with Ed Pilkington, Robert Booth and Charles Arthur

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Version 1.0

Epub ISBN 9780852652404

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Published by Guardian Books 2011

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Copyright © The Guardian

David Leigh and Luke Harding have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

Guardian Books

Kings Place

90 York Way

London

N1 9GU

www.guardianbooks.co.uk

A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-85265-239-8

CONTENTS

Cast of characters

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Hunt

Chapter 2: Bradley Manning

Chapter 3: Julian Assange

Chapter 4: The rise of WikiLeaks

Chapter 5: The Apache video

Chapter 6: The Lamo dialogues

Chapter 7: The deal

Chapter 8: In the bunker

Chapter 9: The Afghanistan war logs

Chapter 10: The Iraq war logs

Chapter 11: The cables

Chapter 12: The world’s most famous man

Chapter 13: Uneasy partners

Chapter 14: Before the deluge

Chapter 15: Publication day

Chapter 16: The biggest leak in history

Chapter 17: The ballad of Wandsworth jail

Chapter 18: The future of WikiLeaks

Appendix: US Embassy Cables

Acknowledgements

CAST OF CHARACTERS

WikiLeaks

MELBOURNE, NAIROBI, REYKJAVIK, BERLIN, LONDON, NORFOLK, STOCKHOLM

Julian Assange– WikiLeaks founder/editor

Sarah Harrison– aide to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

Kristinn Hrafnsson– Icelandic journalist and WikiLeaks supporter

James Ball– WikiLeaks data expert

Vaughan Smith– former Grenadier Guards captain, founder of the Frontline Club and Assange’s host at Ellingham Hall

Jacob Appelbaum– WikiLeaks’ representative in the US

Daniel Ellsberg– Vietnam war whistleblower, WikiLeaks supporter

Daniel Domscheit-Berg– German programmer and WikiLeaks technical architect (aka Daniel Schmitt)

Mikael Viborg– owner of WikiLeaks’ Swedish internet service provider PRQ

Ben Laurie– British encryption expert, adviser to Assange on encryption

Mwalimu Mati– head of anti-corruption group Mars Group Kenya, source of first major WikiLeaks report

Rudolf Elmer– former head of the Cayman Islands branch of the Julius Baer bank, source of second major WikiLeaks report

Smári McCarthy– Iceland-based WikiLeaks enthusiast, programmer, Modern Media Initiative (MMI) campaigner

Birgitta Jónsdóttir– Icelandic MP and WikiLeaks supporter

Rop Gonggrijp– Dutch hacker-businessman, friend of Assange and MMI campaigner

Herbert Snorrason– Icelandic MMI campaigner

Israel Shamir– WikiLeaks associate

Donald Böstrom– Swedish journalist and WikiLeaks’ Stockholm connection

The Guardian

LONDON

Alan Rusbridger– editor-in-chief

Nick Davies– investigative reporter

David Leigh– investigations editor

Ian Katz– deputy editor (news)

Ian Traynor– Europe correspondent

Harold Frayman– systems editor

Declan Walsh– Pakistan/Afghanistan correspondent

Alastair Dant– data visualiser

Simon Rogers– data editor

Jonathan Steele– former Iraq correspondent

James Meek– former Iraq correspondent

Rob Evans– investigative journalist

Luke Harding– Moscow correspondent

Robert Booth– reporter

Stuart Millar– news editor, guardian.co.uk

Janine Gibson– editor, guardian.co.uk

Jonathan Casson– head of production

Gill Phillips– in-house head of legal

Jan Thompson– managing editor

New York Times

NEW YORK, LONDON

Max Frankel– former executive editor

Bill Keller– editor

Eric Schmitt– war correspondent

John F Burns– London correspondent

Ian Fisher– deputy foreign editor

Der Spiegel

HAMBURG, LONDON

Georg Mascolo– editor-in-chief

Holger Stark– head of German desk

Marcel Rosenbach– journalist

John Goetz– journalist

El País

MADRID, LONDON

Javier Moreno– editor-in-chief

Vicente Jiménez– deputy editor

Other Media

Raffi Khatchadourian– New Yorker staffer and author of a major profile of Assange

Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen– Reuters news agency employees accidentally killed by US army pilots in 2007

David Schlesinger– Reuters’ editor-in-chief

Kevin Poulsen– former hacker, senior editor at Wired

Gavin MacFadyen– City University professor and journalist, London host to Assange