WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange leaves Belmarsh Magistrates' Court in London on Feb. 11, 2011.The Associated Press
Reading a disgruntled insider's take on the rise and fall of WikiLeaks is much like reading a 21st-century version of George Orwell's Animal Farm. Both books feature a ragtag handful of insurgents, whose teamwork garners them initial success. And both portray a charismatic pig as the group's leader, a figurehead who publicly denounces tyranny, even as he privately imposes it.
This, at least, is the impression one gets from the memoir of Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who seems to regard himself as a dutiful Igor to Julian Assange's mercurial Dr. Frankenstein.
Penned in a hurry by a German computer geek who left the fold only a few months ago, Inside WikiLeaks is not particularly well written. But it's a gripping yarn of enormous significance to current affairs, as well as a case study in how to lose friends and alienate people.
"Initiatives like this always needed someone crazy enough to be the vanguard," dishes the author, in one of his many backhanded compliments to Assange. "Who could have known better than me?"
As the world now knows, Assange is a visionary Australian hacker. His concept for WikiLeaks was to create an Internet conduit where whistle-blowers could send scandalous secret documents, without fear of reprisal.
Near the start of 2008, he met an orderly German programmer, Domscheit-Berg, at the Chaos Computer Club meeting in Berlin. A true believer who quickly became Assange's acolyte, Domscheit-Berg signed up for a life of asceticism, casting aside his office job, his girlfriend and much of his self-respect in the process.
From scratch and on a shoestring, they built WikiLeaks into a force with which governments everywhere now have to reckon - especially with the ongoing dump of 250,000 secret U.S. State Department cables. A couple of years before that, however, WikiLeaks "had initially consisted of two individuals and a single server," the author reveals.
The site gradually began to amass funding and volunteers, leveraging small disclosures into greater ones. At first, the two men shared small apartments. They would sit in monastic silence, typing away on outdated laptops. Once they drove more than 2,100 kilometres together in a car they rented for a day, to stash a network of secure servers around Europe.
The tandem took so many pains to cover their tracks that aggrieved corporations and governments now find that trying to shut down WikiLeaks is lot like grasping air. As an entity, the site exists everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Despite the close partnership, Domscheit-Berg remained something like the tech-support guy. Arguments over money erupted. He writes that Assange bristled at any notion of sharing the limelight with a "co-founder."
Even so, the financial constraints were such that they did have to double up at bedtime - not that this apparently inhibited Assange's womanizing ways.
"Julian insisted she come to the hotel. My problem was that we shared not only a room but a large double bed," the author writes of one occasion. "I buried my head and tried to sleep."
Domscheit-Berg vents over many past indignities he says he suffered as Assange's right hand. He recalls Assange's habit of eating with his hands, using his (greasy) pants as a napkin. He says Assange traumatized his pet cat. He recalls his partner's penchant for 22-year-old women.
The grievances can seem petty. More compelling is the case that, as WikiLeaks grew, Assange became more demeaning, paranoid and reckless. Last summer, just as WikiLeaks was publicizing its most significant revelations about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it was also suffering its greatest setbacks.
That was when U.S. Private First Class Bradley Manning was arrested for allegedly supplying WikiLeaks with tens of thousands of secret U.S. documents; he remains jailed today. Around the same time, the Pentagon began publicly accusing the site of a lack of rigour in vetting documents - claiming this potentially imperilled the lives of soldiers and informants in war zones.
In September, Assange was publicly accused of sexual assault by two Swedish women and authorities sought him for questioning. This scandal forced core WikiLeaks members to ponder how they might be forced to function without Assange. They talked about this and other business only in secure chat rooms, where they were known only by the initials of their first names.
Domscheit-Berg recounts how the sex charges led to the ultimate chat-room blowup with Assange:
J: [The charges]will go away at the end of the week.
D: No they won't … people do not like the way this is being dealt with.
The WikiLeaks founder apparently responded to these criticisms by telling the author that "I will destroy you" and "I will not tolerate disloyalty in crisis."
Conversations like this were why Domscheit-Berg left WikiLeaks, and why others followed suit. The outfit is now an Assange-centred shell of its former self, the author argues. He has launched a rival site.
Fallings out aside, the WikiLeaks experiment has proved that a handful of motivated computer geeks with a powerful idea can pry open the vaults of secret government documents in a way no one else can.
And all things considered, the author of Inside WikiLeaks has few regrets: WikiLeaks "is the best thing that has ever happened to me."
Colin Freeze writes on national security issues for The Globe and Mail.