Rusbridger responded that things had changed. WikiLeaks had sprung a leak itself. The cables had fallen into the hands of Heather Brooke. Things would soon move out of our control unless they decided to act more quickly. Assange didn’t look well. He was pale and sweating and had a racking cough. Rusbridger stuck to the line that he hadn’t given anyone the cables – which was perfectly true – and eventually persuaded Assange that it was better to deal with the larger group.
David Leigh immediately objected, however, to the presence of Stephens and Robinson. This was an editorial meeting, he protested. If Assange was going to have lawyers there, the Guardian needed lawyers. Rusbridger went off to try and raise a lawyer. The Guardian’s head of legal was cycling home and could not hear her BlackBerry ringing, so Geraldine Proudler, from the legal firm Olswang, who had fought many battles on behalf of the Guardian in the past, was interrupted at her gym and jumped in a taxi.
The argument – for the moment without lawyers – began again with the Spiegel team of editor-in-chief Georg Mascolo, Holger Stark and Marcel Rosenbach. Assange seemed obsessed with the New York Times, however, and launched into repeated denunciations of the paper.
“They ran a front-page story – the front page! – a front-page story which was just a sleazy hit job against me personally, and other parts of the organisation, and based upon falsehoods. It wasn’t even an assemblage of genuine criticism, assembling criticism without any balance. Their aim is to make themselves look impartial. It is not enough to simply be impartial. It is not enough to simply go: ‘That’s the story’ and put it through – they actually have to be actively hostile towards us, and demonstrate that on the front page, lest they be accused of being some kind of sympathiser.”
The Burns profile had dwelt, among other things, on the continuing police investigation into the Swedish sex allegations. Assange was quoted saying: “They called me the James Bond of journalism. It got me a lot of fans, and some of them ended up causing me a bit of trouble.”
Burns had written that WikiLeaks staff had turned against Assange in the scandal’s wake. They complained, he wrote, that their founder’s “growing celebrity has been matched by an increasingly dictatorial, eccentric and capricious style”. To one defector, 25-year-old Icelander Herbert Snorrason, Assange messaged: “If you have a problem with me, you can piss off.” Assange had announced: “I am the heart and soul of this organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organiser, financier, and all the rest.” Snorrason riposted stoutly: “He is not in his right mind.”
Burns’ piece actually omitted the full facts: Assange’s key lieutenant, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, was also privately denouncing Assange’s “cult of stardom”. The German would write later: “It is not for nothing that many who have quit refer to him as a ‘dictator’. He thinks of himself as the autocratic ruler of the project and believes himself accountable to no one. Justified, even internal, criticism – whether about his relations with women or the lack of transparency in his actions – is either dismissed with the statement ‘I’m busy, there are two wars I have to end’ or attributed to the secret services’ smear campaigns.”
Round the Guardian editor’s table, the others now sat silently as Assange fulminated against Burns and the New York Times in the strangely old-fashioned declamatory baritone he used when angry. He returned to his questions. Did they have the cables? How?
The problem, interjected Rusbridger, was that the paper now had a second source for the cables. It was negotiating with Heather Brooke for her to join the Guardian team. Otherwise she would be free to take them to any paper – which would mean the Guardian losing all access, control and exclusivity. Assange turned on Rusbridger. This wasn’t a second source. Brooke had stolen the cables. It had been done “by theft, by deception … certainly unethical means”. He knew enough about the way she had operated to “destroy” her. The climax came when Assange (the underground leaker of illegal secrets) threatened that his lawyers could sue for the loss of WikiLeaks’ “financial assets”.
“I’d look forward to such a court case,” said the Guardian’s editor with a smile. None of this tirade made sense to Rusbridger. Brooke was a professional journalist: she had stolen nothing. More to the point, either the Guardian had a second source – in which case it no longer had to rely on Assange’s copy – or it all originated, as Assange claimed, from a single source, WikiLeaks, in which case WikiLeaks had broken its agreement to make a copy only for the Guardian, and Assange was in a poor position to be ranting at others.
Katz asked what other copies of the database existed: for instance, was it correct that Ellsberg had one? Assange shot back: “Daniel Ellsberg’s is an encrypted back-up copy of the database which he was to give the New York Times in a piece of political theatre.”
Assange returned to his favourite theme of how a gentleman leaker would behave: “People who aren’t behaving like gentlemen should start behaving like one. On the basis that the Guardian has given this to the New York Times, why should we collaborate with the Guardian?”
Assange began suggesting deals with other American papers. The Washington Post was hungry for this stuff. Under questioning, he elaborated a little, admitting that he had already been in discussion both with the Post and the US McClatchy newspaper group about possible co-operation.
Assange launched into the NYT again: “The strategy that the New York Times engaged in was … not very gentlemanly … They wrote a terrible piece about Bradley Manning and this terrible, terrible piece about me on the front page by John F Burns. He says that he has received the most criticism of anything that he has ever written in his entire journalistic career over that piece, from senior people, and there’s a reason for that.
“We’re willing to engage in realpolitik if necessary, but that’s an organisation whose modus operandi is to protect itself, by destroying us. I do advise you to read it. It is obvious to anyone who reads it that it is designed to be a smear. It uses unnamed sources to quote some random person who has never had anything to do with our organisation except running some chat room, saying that I’m mad, etcetera, etcetera. It really is bad journalism. I’m not asking much. We are asking for the Times to follow its own standards. The standards that it follows for other people, because those standards apply, and the Times should not go out of its way to produce a negative, sleazy hit-piece and place it on the front page.”
Katz asked him directly how far he had got in negotiation with the Washington Post. “I haven’t made an agreement. Though I think we’ll probably go with the Post unless we get a very good counter-offer, because the Times has defiled the relationship.”