10

CABLEGATE

Harold Hongju Koh, a lawyer for the US State Department in Washington, is responsible for giving legal advice on everything from trade disputes to inter-government relations. The work is arcane and often tedious. But as Koh made his way to his office on 26 November 2010, a message arrived that promised to shake things up. WikiLeaks’ lawyer Jennifer Robinson had written to the US ambassador in London with a request for the US government. She said that WikiLeaks was about to publish a number of the 260 000 classified communiqués between the US State Department and its embassies around the world dating from 1966 to early 2010—and they needed his help to remove the names of people who might be harmed if they were published.

Ambassador Louis Susman’s reaction to this is not recorded, but as a long-time Democratic Party financial backer and former banker he hadn’t landed the plum London posting because of his diplomatic skills. Ambassador Susman had passed on the request to the State Department. He didn’t know it then, but it would turn out that Susman had a vested interest in the outcome. One of the cables was written by him, reporting on a conversation he had with Australian High Commissioner John Dauth, in which Dauth said he thought the international community should pack up and leave Afghanistan. Another cable from his embassy said the British government had promised to protect the United States from probing questions during its investigation into the Iraq war.

It was Koh’s job to fire off a blunt response. ‘Dear Ms Robinson and Mr Assange,’ he wrote. ‘If any of the materials you intend to publish were provided by any government officials, or any intermediary without proper authorisation, they were provided in violation of US law …’

Publication would put at risk the lives of ‘countless innocent individuals’, threaten ongoing military operations and just for good measure, ‘place at risk ongoing cooperation between countries—partners, allies and common stakeholders—to confront common challenges, from terrorism to pandemic diseases to nuclear proliferation, that threaten global stability’. The United States wanted the material back, or at least destroyed and removed from the WikiLeaks website.

Just a few weeks earlier the New York Times had published an exceedingly unflattering report about Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks organisation. Though it was written by Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter John F Burns, it had the look and feel of a tabloidstyle hit. Burns told the New York Times readers it wasn’t just governments that were denouncing Assange. His former supporters were also abandoning him for what they saw as ‘erratic and imperious behaviour and a nearly delusional grandeur’. They were also becoming more aware that ‘the digital secrets he reveals can have a price in flesh and blood’.

The New York Times article was attacking someone who had just provided the newspaper with its best and biggest stories in years. Assange described it as a ‘smear’ against him.

It was certainly true that many in the organisation were angry at what they saw as Assange’s high-handed and autocratic behaviour. Rebuffing a critic who questioned WikiLeaks’ failure to redact names from the Afghan War Logs, Assange wrote: ‘I am the heart and soul of this organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organiser, financier and all the rest. If you have a problem with me, piss off.’

Assange called Daniel Ellsberg and told him he was going to cut out the New York Times from all future document releases. ‘I said I thought he was absolutely right in being mad at John Burns and John Burns was inexcusable, but that I wouldn’t make an enemy of the New York Times. He should try to work with them,’ recalls Ellsberg. ‘He just said: “Fuck them”. He was mad at them and I know how he feels.’

The truth is the New York Times simply didn’t need Assange any more. And as it prepared to negotiate the difficult political terrain that came with publishing a major exposé of US foreign policy, it sought to distance itself from him. An article like Burns’ would certainly help the newspaper deal with the avalanche of criticism that was bound to pour in after publication of the leaks.

It was now clear that the New York Times and the Guardian were in cahoots. They had set a publication date, 5 November, for the first tranche of Cablegate material. The two newspapers were going to ambush WikiLeaks, only telling them of the plans to publish two days before they went to press. At Der Spiegel, there was a growing sense of discomfort amid the possibility they might be dumped. The planned publication date was a Friday—and Der Spiegel is published on a Monday.

When Assange got wind of the plans to publish early he threatened to put all the Cablegate material online. He was particularly angry that the New York Times was being included. If the New York Times was in, the whole world would get access to the Cablegate material. There would be no exclusive. For Assange it wasn’t just the profile by Burns that turned him against the Times. He had been angry that while Der Spiegel ran a front-page story on Task Force 373—the US assassination squad in Afghanistan—it received far less prominent treatment in the US newspaper, prompting the question of who was protecting who.

Over at the well-appointed Der Spiegel offices near the Brandenberg Gate in central Berlin, the Germans looked on in horror. They demanded a meeting to sort out the differences. The magazine’s editors were worried that the entire cooperative venture would fall apart and, as they put it, partners would turn into competitors. They scheduled a meeting at the Guardian’s offices for 6 p.m. on 1 November. Assange, wearing the attire he saves for special occasions, a blue suit and white shirt, was his customary half an hour late. But it was the team he brought with him that caused the most interest—his lawyers Mark Stephens and Jennifer Robinson. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger quickly called for the newspaper’s legal representative. Der Spiegel didn’t bring any lawyers but did have a full complement: Holger Stark, Marcel Rosenbach and the magazine’s editor-in-chief, George Mascolo. It would have been a complete team of old and new media but for one group that was missing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Der Spiegel reported, the New York Times did not attend.

Assange walked in, sat down and got straight to the point. Does the New York Times have a copy of the Cablegate material? He repeated the question and, according to the Der Spiegel team, ‘it sliced through the room’, which by now was very still. ‘And if so, where did it get a copy?’ he asked. According to Assange, his next question to the group was: ‘Did you give it to them in violation of our agreement?’ Assange says that Rusbridger scanned the room and refused to answer the question. Assange said: ‘What’s the point in making an agreement if people will dishonour it?’

The story seemed to be that the Guardian had acquired another copy of the WikiLeaks cables and shared some of the information on it with the New York Times. If it was another copy, it wasn’t governed by the same agreement as the one Assange had given to the newspaper. The Guardian says that it got the copy of the cables from freelance journalist Heather Brooke, who was apparently given it by one of the Icelandic WikiLeaks supporters, Smari McCarthy in early October. But according to WikiLeaks, McCarthy said he wiped that copy from Brooke’s computer. So when did the Guardian get its own copy? Possibly it came much later, according to one source familiar with the case as late as November 1st, just four days before the planned publication date. The clear suggestion is that the Guardian produced the Cablegate stories using the WikiLeaks files they were supposedly holding in trust. While Assange called it theft, someone in the room pointed out: it’s all stolen material. Rusbridger was more urbane. He simply made the point that the leaker had been leaked.

Der Spiegel was not sure what was going on. Understandably nervous that it might be shut out of Cablegate again, it asked the Guardian for a copy, but at the time of publishing this book they had not received one.

What the Guardian did by bringing Brooke onto the Cablegate team was smart. Rusbridger, who had written a foreword for one of her books, bound her exclusively to the newspaper for the duration of Cablegate, preventing her from selling her copy to one of the newspaper’s competitors. WikiLeaks was playing in the cutthroat world of journalism and it was losing control.

More than three hours later, as everyone decamped downstairs for some food at the Rotunda Restaurant, Assange was by all accounts still fuming about the New York Times. What Assange wanted was no more negative stories about him and even a front-page correction. His lawyer Mark Stephens, who was playing the role of mediator, came up with what seemed like the best solution to end the stand off: the New York Times should publish an opinion piece by WikiLeaks.

Rusbridger got up from the table and called Bill Keller, the New York Times’ executive editor in New York. When he came back the news wasn’t encouraging. Assange would be treated like any other complainant—he could write a letter to the newspaper. The only guarantee Keller could give was that the New York Times wasn’t planning any sleazy hit pieces. Assange was not happy. He even gave an indication that he was going to pull out of the deal with both newspapers.

Rusbridger summed up: Assange could cut out the New York Times and go with the Washington Post instead, but since he had lost control of the material that would result in chaos. The best decision was to go with the existing arrangements. Persuasively he argued in what must have been one of the most syrupy diplomatic pitches on record: ‘We’re good at working together, we like each other. We’ve communicated well with your lot. It’s gone well. Why on earth throw it away?’

As they parted that night, Assange shook David Leigh’s hand. Though Assange felt he’d been duped by Leigh, he had a grudging respect for him. ‘He is genuinely interested in the journalism that he does, that is a big tick from me, that he actually does care about his story. But that’s all he fucking cares about. So it doesn’t matter who he fucks to do it—it’s immoral, duplicitous behaviour to get as much exclusivity, as possible.’ Yet from the outset Assange had been trying to control who had the right to use the material and how it was released. He had given five big media organisations access to the exclusion of every other media outlet in the world, forcing them to play catch up on the cables. It was hypocritical for Assange to argue about exclusivity.

The next day Rusbridger sent an offer for a settlement. The Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel were still involved, and now Assange also wanted to formally include France’s Le Monde, which had negotiated a side deal for access to the Iraq material, and also Spain’s El Pais newspaper. Assange was keen for WikiLeaks to extend its reach far into the French- and Spanish-speaking areas of the world, which until then had been largely neglected. The decision to include Le Monde was designed to cause problems for the dictatorships in former French colonies in Northern Africa. The extraordinary events that would eventually unfold there would surprise Assange as much as the rest of the world.

As Assange mulled over the offer he examined the alternatives: ‘We still had some levers in this meeting, we could have gone—right, we can give the whole lot to Al Jazeera, we can give it all to AP [the wire service Associated Press] and NewsCorp, fuck ’em.’ But Assange said with ‘too many cables coming out too quickly’ this would ‘saturate the market’, reducing the number of investigative stories which in turn would limit the level of what he called ‘political reform’.

Importantly, Assange secured a caveat that if there was a critical attack on WikiLeaks he would be free to release everything immediately. In the coming weeks that particular part of the agreement would be heavily tested.

There was something else Assange had to consider as he ruminated over whether to accept or reject the offer. ‘We would have the Guardian and the New York Times campaigning against us and those are two big cannons … at the very moment the Pentagon and the White House was campaigning against us.’ Assange finally accepted the offer—he didn’t need any more enemies than he already had. He was increasingly worried about being picked up off the street in London by US intelligence and whisked away to the United States. He had been lying low with people from the Frontline Club in Paddington, West London, run by its amiable founder, Vaughan Smith.

They made an odd couple: Smith, a former Grenadier Guards officer, had made a name for himself as a daring journalist covering the first Iraq war. Here was a right-wing libertarian supporting a hybrid lefty-libertarian, but their views meshed on one big issue: the problems of state power and individual privacy. Smith had another great quality: Ellingham Hall, a ten-bedroom Georgian manor in Norfolk—the perfect bolt-hole if the going got too tough in London. And early in November, with the deal settled with the Guardian, it became less necessary for Assange to remain there. He had already agreed that WikiLeaks’ role this time would be to post the documents online as the newspaper wrote the stories.

He must have been growing tired of his treatment by the Guardian a newspaper he admired and believed was socially progressive. One witness to a discussion between Assange and senior Guardian staff including its editor and deputy editor said they were conceited and dismissive. This witness was surprised by their treatment of Assange; describing it as “shitting on the goose that had laid the golden egg” for their newspaper. [source: author informant]

One night, wearing a ridiculous-looking wig, he was driven the three and a half hours over some of the flattest countryside in Britain to the surprisingly quaint village of Bungay, and then through the winding streets to Ellingham Hall. As the car carrying Assange and his group made its way up the driveway and through part of the 600-acre wooded land that surrounds the property, Assange had every reason to be anxious about the security of WikiLeaks. The organisation was in deep trouble.

When Domscheit-Berg left WikiLeaks in September after a protracted falling-out with Assange, Assange suspected he’d taken with him more than his personal laptop. Domscheit-Berg had access to the codes and servers that not only stored WikiLeaks’ data in Germany—they were the key to the system that protected the identities of whistleblowers and allowed them to download secrets in complete safety. Remarkably, for all his computer wizardry Assange did not have access to the codes. Without them the system couldn’t work, so for the past two months at least WikiLeaks had been offair—unable to take submissions. WikiLeaks posted an explanation that the site was down due to maintenance and engineering issues, but it wasn’t true.

On several occasions he asked for Domscheit-Berg to return the codes and arranged for him to have meetings with WikiLeaks representatives. But this only caused more frustrations. On one occasion Domscheit-Berg agreed to return them, but when he did hand over the data the ‘hard drives were empty [and] there was nothing there,’ according to Assange.

Just a few weeks before the Cablegate exposé, an Australian woman working with WikiLeaks travelled to Germany to ask Domscheit-Berg for the codes. She is a calm and intelligent person and did her best to explain that WikiLeaks was about to go through its most severe test yet—and it needed maximum security. After the niceties had been dispensed with she asked Domscheit-Berg the question: Where are the access codes?

‘What access codes?’ he said.

‘For all these servers,’ she said.

‘He has these already. It’s all been handed over.’

Assange has been accused by many people of being difficult to work with, and one of the biggest complaints is that he says one thing to one person and something else to another. In late November I travelled to a town in the far east of Germany near the Polish border to talk with Domscheit-Berg. When we discussed the fact that Assange claimed Domscheit-Berg still had the codes he refuted that saying he had returned them: ‘This is all sort of weird misinformation that he’s spreading to people. And it’s again—you see one-to-one conversations of him telling everyone a customised version of the truth.’

But it was Domscheit-Berg who was having difficulty with the truth has since admitted publicly that he and another activist known as ‘the architect’—who built the submission system and the original WikiLeaks infrastructure—had taken the codes. Their actions shut down the whistleblower submissions system just before they both left the organisation. By early 2011 WikiLeaks was still unable to handle whistleblower material. Effectively, Assange had been locked out of his own organisation.

Domscheit-Berg now says he and ‘the architect’ will give them back when they decide that the system is secure. One of the reasons they took them, he says, is because security was lax at WikiLeaks, something Assange denies.

As Julian Assange settled down for his first night at Ellingham Hall it wasn’t just the internal problems in WikiLeaks that were giving him concern. The US investigation was gathering pace.

Across the Atlantic, David House was returning home after a holiday with his girlfriend in Mexico. It had been a well-deserved break. As a founder of the Bradley Manning Support Network, he had worked hard to set up the website to raise money for Manning’s defence when the world’s attention was fixed on Assange. But at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, House was pulled aside. He said officials who told him they were from Homeland Security seized his laptop, mobile phone, flash drive and other electronic equipment, and asked him for names of others in the support network.

House knew Manning, but not that well. They had met when Manning turned up at a workshop on hacking in Boston. When Manning was arrested House decided he would help, and visited him three times in his Quantico Marine Corps Base prison cell. It was about this time that military intelligence began focusing in on Manning’s friends in the Boston area where House also lives, apparently trying to recruit members of the hacking community to spy on WikiLeaks. With House they went one step further, following him in the street and staking out his home. On one occasion, he said, four people came to his door: two identified themselves as military investigators, the others said they were from the State Department. When he invited them in they spent more than an hour talking about WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning, and pumping him for information.

The investigators were getting anxious, and little wonder. WikiLeaks had just announced it was going to release the drop of cables that were seven times bigger than the Iraq War Logs. Journalists with their pocket calculators came up with an extraordinary figure: nearly three million documents. What Assange deliberately omitted was that he meant it was seven times the number of words—not documents. ‘It appears that the State Department thought we had a lot more than we did,’ Assange told me later with a mischievous smile.

The Thanksgiving holiday is usually a period when even politicians get some time to relax with their families; many of them make it a long weekend. But on the last Friday of November, the gloomy day perfectly reflected the atmosphere at the State Department where Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, was preparing for a press conference. She looked stressed and exhausted: Clinton had been informed of what was coming. The biggest leak in history—an exposure of the inner workings of the US Government and its foreign policy. But she couldn’t say she wasn’t warned.

Nine days before publication, the New York Times told her administration to get ready for the firestorm of information that was heading its way. Two days later, the newspaper’s Washington bureau chief, Dean Baquet, and two of his colleagues made their way down to the State Department. Apart from the New York Times, they were also representing the interests of the Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais. After they passed through security, they were shown into a ‘windowless room’ where they encountered an ‘unsmiling crowd’. It was an impressive turnout. Gathered around a conference table were representatives from the White House, the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI and the Pentagon. Others, who did not identify themselves, added to the packed room.

It was ‘fair to say the mood was tense’ according to the Times’, Bill Keller. Another said there were signs of suppressed outrage and frustration. Here the old tests were about to be applied with vigour: the fine balance between the government’s right to hold secrets and the public’s right to know. This would be the Internet age’s biggest test of that balance.

WikiLeaks, though not directly represented, was a powerful presence in the room. Though the New York Times would be the last to admit it, WikiLeaks’ ability to disclose everything on the Internet without challenge tilted the balance very much in favour of the newspaper’s representatives, as the group worked their way through the amount of disclosure the government would accept.

Baquet understood the most important issue was to protect individuals who had spoken candidly to American diplomats in countries that had oppressive regimes. The second category of importance included sensitive US programs, usually related to intelligence. The New York Times agreed to withhold some of this information.

It was the third category the newspaper had the most disagreement about. The State Department feared that publication of cables that disclosed candid comments by and about foreign officials—including heads of state—would strain relations with those countries. The New York Times was mostly unconvinced by this argument.

In what must have come as a great comfort to the newspaper, the US government’s fury was directed at the presumed source of the leaked material, Bradley Manning, and in particular WikiLeaks. According to Der Spiegel, the US government was not interested in quarrelling with the media organisations involved. Two days after the meeting, the US Ambassador to Germany, Philip Murphy, reinforced the message: ‘I’m incredibly angry. I don’t begrudge Der Spiegel and the press, who are just doing their jobs. I am criticising those who stole this material.’ It was a convenient argument for the United States—it retained its relationships with the powerful old media while demonising the newcomer.

Assange had a very straightforward view of how to correct the power imbalance. You get the impression that if he really had his way the US would receive virtually no warning at all. He was unhappy that the ‘perpetrator’ was aware before the ‘victims’, and that the State Department would be able to have enough time to Clinton embarked on a global tour to quell the anxiety of many of the world’s leaders, others had developed a different tactic to blunt the WikiLeaks attack. Just before the launch, a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack hit the WikiLeaks site. Thousands of computers linked through one controller began simultaneously trying to contact WikiLeaks. As the attack continued it grew stronger and stronger. In the end the ‘requests’ were asking WikiLeaks to deliver the equivalent of 114 full-length movies every second. As the site was collapsing it must have crossed Assange’s mind to fire off all 260 000 cables at once, as per his agreement with the Guardian, if the situation got too hostile. Instead Assange kept his cool and WikiLeaks shut down the US server that had come under such ferocious attack, and switched all requests to Sweden. It’s never been revealed who was behind the cyber assault but all it did was draw even more attention to the impending stories—and they rolled onto the Internet as planned, unimpeded by the crisis.

The front-page headline in the Guardian said: ‘US Embassy Cables Leak Sparks Global Diplomacy Crisis.’ The report said that the United States had been catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of ‘more than 250 000 classified cables from its embassies’. It focused on calls by the Saudi king for the United States to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons program, as well as the fact that Hillary Clinton had ordered US State Department officers to spy on the UN’s leadership, gathering everything from frequent flyer numbers, health records and samples of DNA.

Der Spiegel’s headline followed the Guardian’s global perspective: before in history has a superpower lost control of such vast amounts of such sensitive information’.

Le Monde headlined: ‘WikiLeaks: A Behind the Scenes Look at US Diplomacy’. The serious French afternoon paper even managed a little humour, pointing out that despite all the hype the documents did not cast new light on who shot President Kennedy.

The New York Times’ coverage was more muted. ‘Leaked Cables Offer Raw Look at US Diplomacy,’ the headline murmured. Although it did report that the cables contained ‘brutally candid views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats’. In what is known in journalism as ‘burying the lead’, the newspaper failed to mention Hillary Clinton’s directive to spy on the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, or that Arab countries were urging an attack on Iran. High up in the story Clinton was given a free kick to say what a terrible thing it was to have her government’s dirty washing aired in public, with no hint that she had directed what at first glance looked like a case of criminal activity against the United Nations.

But it wasn’t all high-end politics. There was plenty of gossip from the cocktail circuit. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi starred with the revelation that he wouldn’t go anywhere without his voluptuous, blonde Ukrainian nurse, and hates flying so much he will only travel short distances by air, something he may have to re-evaluate as demonstrators took to the streets demanding his ousting in early 2011.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, was referred to as an ‘alpha dog’ and the only mildly disparaging comment about Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi appeared to be that his late-night partying left him insufficient energy for his day job.

While the New York Times was trying to balance its relationship with the Obama administration, its more conservative readership and those who don’t believe in any form of censorship, it certainly wasn’t honouring the motto it has carried on the masthead for decades: ‘All The News That’s Fit To Print’.

The slow release of stories, taken from just a handful of the leaked documents, was partly a tactic by Assange to create maximum impact over many months and partly to keep the Americans guessing about what was in the vast bulk of the remaining Cablegate documents. The day by day leaking of individual documents gave journalists the upper hand in their dealings with the State Department. But on 3 December, five days after the first Cablegate release, the plan came horribly undone. The Guardian posted the identifying information of every single one of the 251 286 cables on its website. Assange, who was still hiding out in the country manor house and having nothing to do with the Guardian’s publication process, was appalled. It tipped off the US administration to the contents of every cable. ‘They released all the metadata … the date of every cable, the subject of every cable, which embassy it was from, where it was to, subject, date, time,’ he said.

It was ‘one thing’ to say it was ‘inevitable’ that WikiLeaks would release a certain number of cables, Assange said, but ‘which of the 251 000?’ That was the important question and the Guardian had just shown the US government exactly which ones. It would allow the United States to ‘prepare their own spin’ now that it knew the identity of the cables, and thus the material they contained.

The Guardian material potentially provided ammunition for the Americans to attack Assange and Manning. There were reports that a grand jury had been empanelled in Virginia to investigate possible charges against them. If the US military computer logs line up with ‘every goddamn record of what we release, that’s very strong evidence,’ he said. It seemed that Assange himself had been caught in the new online world of openness and full publication.

Yet for all its intelligence gathering, the US government still did not understand what WikiLeaks was doing. The White House said it anticipated WikiLeaks would make public ‘several hundred thousand’ cables on Sunday night, according to the New York Times. This was incorrect—Assange would release only a handful of cables at that time. As Ellsberg points out: ‘About half a dozen people in the country are giving Julian credit for having withheld 99 per cent of the 260 000 cables. He has put out 1900 cables—less than 1 per cent. No one seems to know that’. It has been called the ‘zombie lie’ that Assange had ‘indiscriminately dumped everything out’. By February 2011 only 4000 cables had been released, leaving approximately 247 000 other documents still to come.

What had been redacted by WikiLeaks and released was sensational enough. Yet still serious errors were made, not by WikiLeaks, but by the newspapers that reported on the released files. A story on Iran reportedly obtaining missiles from North Korea that were capable of attacking Russia and Western Europe was merely speculation, but it was reported as near fact by the New York Times. The newspaper was on safer ground with revelations that the US had been trying to remove highly enriched uranium from a Pakistan nuclear research facility in the fear that it could end up in a terrorist device, and that China would not necessarily support North Korea indefinitely, weakening the rogue nation in the eyes of the world. And in Yemen the US had been secretly bombing terrorist targets, with the Yemini president saying: ‘We’ll continue to say the bombs are ours, not yours.’ Soon after the Yemini people read this story, they took to the streets in an attempt to topple the government.

The fact that WikiLeaks was on occasions more careful than the mainstream media made no difference to the attacks against the organisation that followed the Cablegate releases.

‘Let’s be clear. This disclosure is not just an attack on America—it’s an attack on the international community,’ Hillary Clinton said. Such leaks ‘tear at the fabric’ of responsible government. ‘There is nothing laudable about endangering innocent people, and there is nothing brave about sabotaging the peaceful relations between nations,’ she added.

Clinton emphasised that she wanted to ‘make it clear to the American people and to our friends and partners that we are taking aggressive steps’ to hold those who leaked the documents to account.

Within hours an official from the office of Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Homeland Security Committee, was on the phone to Amazon who had been hosting WikiLeaks during the Cablegate release. Twenty-four hours later, the company announced it was disconnecting the WikiLeaks service, forcing it to switch to another server based in the Cold War bunker in Sweden.

Lieberman said that Amazon’s ‘decision to cut off WikiLeaks now’ was the right decision and should set the standard for other companies that WikiLeaks was using to distribute its ‘illegally seized material’. He called on ‘any other company or organisation that is hosting WikiLeaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them’. In a message sent via Twitter, WikiLeaks fired back that if Amazon was ‘so uncomfortable with the First Amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books’.

As the flood of attacks continued Vice President Joe Biden weighed in, describing Assange as a dangerous ‘hi-tech terrorist’, while right-wing politicians set the temperature to boiling point by inciting violent action against Assange and Manning.

The former governor of Arkansas and a Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee said: ‘They’ve put American lives at risk. They put relationships that will take decades to rebuild at risk. Whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason, and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty.’

Sarah Palin, a likely presidential candidate in 2012, posted on her Facebook page: ‘He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaida and Taliban leaders?’

University of Calgary Professor Tom Flanagan who helped organise the campaign of the Canadian prime minister, said: ‘Well I think Assange should be assassinated actually. I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something.’

As the clamour increased, PayPal cut off the account used by WikiLeaks to collect donations. PostFinance announced it had frozen Assange’s accounts and MasterCard and Visa announced they had stopped payments to WikiLeaks, seriously imperilling its financing and future of the organisation.

Even in the bucolic surrounds of Ellingham Hall, the world was closing in on Assange. At Sweden’s request Interpol had issued a red alert for his arrest to face questioning in Sweden over the sex allegations, and his lawyers were negotiating with the British police extradition squad about where he might hand himself in. A bail hearing would decide whether he remained free or was held in prison while he waited for the extradition case to start after Christmas. When he finally arrived at Horseferry Road Magistrates Court for the hearing he appeared in dark suit and sunglasses, looking less the hacker from Melbourne and more like the star he had become.

Jemima Khan, former wife of Pakistani cricketer and politician Imran Khan, was there to back Assange, with bail money if necessary, as was director Ken Loach, famed for his insightful films on social justice, and Australian filmmaker, author and journalist, John Pilger.

In arguing against Assange getting bail, Gemma Lindfield, the lawyer from the British Crown Prosecution Service appointed to represent the Swedish case, made a big play of Assange’s peripatetic nature—the fact that he moved from town to town and country to country with little more than a backpack and a couple of computers to keep him company. Looking around the court, the same description might have been applied to half the journalists covering the case.

Inexplicably, despite the fact that the WikiLeaks website is always pleading poverty and appealing for money, Lindfield asserted that ‘it was clear’ that Assange had access to money. What she appeared to have missed was that the biggest credit card companies in the world had all frozen WikiLeaks’ funds.

When Assange’s lawyer Mark Stephens got to his feet, his argument for Assange to be released on bail included the simple fact that he ‘had nowhere to go’, ‘was instantly recognisable’ and, besides, he had already handed in his passport.

The feeling in the Assange camp was positive and though their confidence was shaken when Judge Riddle muddled up WikiLeaks with the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, they still thought the prosecution had failed to make its case. Assange was bound to be released on bail. Sitting in his glass cage in the courtroom, his signature grey hair shorter than usual, Assange was paying particularly close attention. After what seemed like an eternity, but was only a few minutes, Judge Riddle concluded of Assange that despite it all, ‘There are substantial grounds to believe he could abscond if granted bail’.

There was a collective, audible gasp. Jennifer Robinson indicated she was shocked by the decision. Assange was led out of his cage and back to the cells below. Outside, Mark Stephens said: ‘Many people believe Mr Assange to be innocent, myself included. Many people believe that this prosecution is politically motivated.’

The closest the cameras got to Assange as he was driven through the crowds in a white prison van was a shot through the window. He made the front pages the next day with a defiant stare and a victory salute.

One week later, Assange returned to court for a second attempt at bail. If the star-studded cast had failed to impress the judge last time, Assange simply doubled the number of the cast—and increased the star quality.

He might be someone who at times had trouble keeping long-term friendships, but he certainly knew how to make them fast. Geoffrey Robertson QC, the celebrated Australian human rights barrister, had cut short his holiday to represent Assange. The documentary filmmaker Michael Moore also put up US$20 000 bail for someone he didn’t know. Bianca Jagger wandered in offering a further touch of the exotic, and the author and investigative journalist Phillip Knightley added credibility.

Conspicuously absent were many of the journalists Assange had worked closely with on Cablegate. At this hearing, Judge Riddle granted bail because Assange had put up better surety, and provided a good address—Vaughan Smith’s country home, Ellingham Hall.

Assange and his team believed he would walk free, but two hours later the prosecution announced it was appealing the bail decision to the High Court. Until the appeal, Assange would be returned to Wandsworth prison and solitary confinement, where he would spend another three days.

With all the time he had for reflection, he found ‘I rather liked myself’. He also discovered he still had a voice from inside prison. ‘We now know that Visa, MasterCard and PayPal are instruments of US foreign policy. It’s not something we knew before.’ The message delivered via his mother, Christine Assange, also called on ‘the world to protect my work and my people from these illegal and immoral acts’.

Assange was talking like a political prisoner, and though he denied it, his supporters took it as a call to arms. Within hours MasterCard had been knocked off the air in a similar attack to the one that had crippled WikiLeaks itself. A group calling themselves Anonymous took responsibility for the attack, which they called ‘Operation Payback’.

As Assange sat in his Wandsworth prison cell he placed a call to Daniel Ellsberg, who had come to his support during the attacks on him in the US. Assange left a spirited message on Ellsberg’s phone, saying he was ‘calling from a Norman Basement Slammer and just called to see how it’s all going’.

It’s a good job Assange didn’t call the New Yorker veteran Seymour Hersh, another of his heroes, most famous for exposing the cover-up of killings by US troops at My Lai during the Vietnam War, and more recently, the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He’d met Hersh earlier on, before ‘Collateral Murder’. Hersh said he saw Assange at a conference where ‘he took me aside’. Asked if he had given Assange any advice, Hersh said: ‘He’s not interested in advice.’ Hersh said that Assange was now discovering that he ‘has the same problems that newspapers do’. He said he felt that Assange ‘just made it worse for himself’, but didn’t elaborate.

Ellsberg too was having difficulty with some of the decisions being made by WikiLeaks. It had posted a secret document—marked NoFor, meaning not to be seen by any foreigners, which identified key infrastructure the US considered critical to its national security. The sites ranged from the Nadym gas pipeline junction in Siberia, which it described as ‘the most critical gas facility in the world’, to a factory that makes parts for nuclear submarines in Scotland, to the Sydney landings for two giant undersea communication cables, as well as many other sites. Ellsberg had grave misgivings about the direction WikiLeaks was taking. He contacted them.

‘I said, “Well I would not have put that out”, and they came back with an answer from somebody saying: “Well, it’s really all on the public record, it’s not all a secret”. I said, “You know, a terrorist could find this stuff easily enough anyway, why give them a lift, I wouldn’t give them a lift. It doesn’t look responsible to me.”’ He added: ‘I don’t know why they put that up. That wrecked it …’

WikiLeaks disagreed with any assessment that the release was dangerous, arguing that the sites were not directly identified. But losing Ellsberg’s support on such a key issue should have caused some consternation. It was a reminder of the Afghan War Logs fiasco where informers were named, helping the White House continue its attacks on WikiLeaks. Yet the degree to which US national security is compromised by the cables is debatable. Reuters news agency reported that ‘a congressional official … said the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers’. In truth, internal US government reviews of Cablegate had determined that the leaks had caused only ‘limited damage to US interests abroad’.

In lock step with the Obama administration, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard echoed the White House’s public statements. She declared that Assange had broken the law, although she couldn’t name exactly which law he had violated. She also announced that the Australian Federal Police had been briefing her on security implications of Assange’s actions.

The Attorney-General Senator Robert McClelland said that the Australian authorities would do all they could to help the US investigation. He even went so far as to say he would look at the possibility of revoking Assange’s Australian passport. Why the government should have taken such an extreme view about one of its citizens may well have had less to do with national interest and more to do with cosying up to the US, or that is how it was perceived.

Cablegate revealed just how close that relationship is. One cabinet member had been snitching to the US Embassy in Canberra on the Labor party’s power struggle before Gillard was elected. Right-wing Labor powerbroker Mark Arbib was one of the major players in the removal of Kevin Rudd as prime minister. The documents identify Arbib, now a minister, as a valuable source of information on the attempts by Rudd to prevent a move against him by Gillard, his then deputy. Arbib’s comments were contained in documents that said his identity should be guarded as a ‘protected’ source.

It’s possible Gillard thought being pro-American and taking a tough line on Assange would play well with the Australian public. It didn’t. Assange has his biggest support base in Australia where opinion polls have said that two thirds of the people agree with the work he has done. What is more surprising is the degree of support he has received from news outlets in the country. In an unprecedented move, representatives from all the major media outlets in Australia with the exception of The Australian newspaper, signed a letter criticising the Prime Minister for her actions: ‘To aggressively attempt to shut WikiLeaks down, to threaten to prosecute those who publish official leaks, and to pressure companies to cease doing commercial business with WikiLeaks, is a serious threat to democracy, which relies on a free and fearless press,’ it said. When the activist organisation Getup.org launched a major campaign, thousands filled the streets at protests in Sydney and Melbourne. Public opinion rallied behind Assange, casting Gillard into the political wilderness on the issue. Assange told the crowd by video: ‘It is interesting how some politicians single out my staff and myself for attack while saying nothing about the slaughter of thousands by the US military or other dictatorships. It is cowardly to bully a small media organisation, but that is what is happening here.’

With Gillard looking vulnerable on the issue, her foreign minister Kevin Rudd dissented from the government line. In Cairo, where WikiLeaks would play a role in what was to unfold in the following months, he took a swipe at the Americans, saying that it was up to them to look after their own secrets. He may well have been irked by their description of him in one cable as a ‘control freak’. But he was also playing to the audience back home, countering McClelland’s threat to revoke Assange’s passport. He said that was his responsibility, not McClelland’s, and even offered to arrange for a computer to be sent to Assange in jail so he could prepare his defence.

The Australian Federal Police would eventually discover that there was nothing they could charge Assange with in Australia. But that didn’t stop the ongoing US inquiry, and the assistance offered by the Australian Attorney-General, who has direct charge of ASIO, Australia’s internal intelligence service.

I have been reliably told that ASIO played an active part in the investigation into Assange, trawling through his life and activities in Australia. But what must be just as worrying for him, and has also never been revealed before, is the fact that the inquiry also included officers from ASIS, Australia’s overseas intelligence agency, which has strong links with the US.

Over in Britain, Assange successfully fought the appeal to the High Court over his bail, and was eventually freed from Wandsworth prison. He had to meet stringent conditions, which included remaining under curfew on Vaughn Smith’s estate, reporting daily to the local police and wearing what’s known as a Glasgow Rolex, an electronic bracelet to track his every movement.

As he emerged victorious from the High Court hearing snow fell, promising an unusually white Christmas. Flanked by his legal team, Robertson, Robinson and Stephens, Assange waved amid a barrage of TV lights and flashing cameras. He might have been tired but he hadn’t lost his sense of irony in prison. ‘It’s great to smell the fresh air of London again,’ he said.

In front of the world’s media he was on message: ‘During my time in solitary confinement in the bottom of a Victorian prison, I had time to reflect on the conditions of those people around the world also in solitary confinement, also on remand, in conditions that are more difficult than those faced by me.’

The next the crowd saw of him, he was being driven off in Vaughan Smith’s white four-wheel drive through the heavy London traffic, up The Strand and towards Fleet Street, the former heart of British journalism. Assange would have plenty of time over Christmas to prepare for the extradition hearing, when Swedish prosecutors would finally reveal full details of the allegations against him.

With a hostile prime minister in his country, the most powerful nation on earth chasing him and the Swedish legal system demanding he be extradited, Assange was embarking on the fight of his life.