Special Report: WikiLeaks
How Russia Often Benefits When Julian Assange Reveals the West’s Secrets
By JO BECKER, STEVEN ERLANGER and ERIC SCHMITT
American officials say Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks probably have no direct
ties to Russian intelligence services. But the agendas of WikiLeaks and
the Kremlin have often dovetailed.
Julian
Assange was in classic didactic form, holding forth on the topic that
consumes him — the perfidy of big government and especially of the
United States.
Mr. Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks, rose to global fame in 2010 for releasing huge caches
of highly classified American government communications that exposed
the underbelly of its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and its sometimes
cynical diplomatic maneuvering around the world. But in a televised
interview last September, it was clear that he still had plenty to say
about “The World According to US Empire,” the subtitle of his latest
book, “The WikiLeaks Files.”
From the cramped confines of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he was granted asylum four years ago
amid a legal imbroglio, Mr. Assange proffered a vision of America as
superbully: a nation that has achieved imperial power by proclaiming
allegiance to principles of human rights while deploying its
military-intelligence apparatus in “pincer” formation to “push”
countries into doing its bidding, and punishing people like him who dare
to speak the truth.
Notably
absent from Mr. Assange’s analysis, however, was criticism of another
world power, Russia, or its president, Vladimir V. Putin, who has hardly
lived up to WikiLeaks’ ideal of transparency. Mr. Putin’s government
has cracked down hard on dissent — spying on, jailing, and, critics
charge, sometimes assassinating opponents while consolidating control
over the news media and internet. If Mr. Assange appreciated the irony
of the moment — denouncing censorship in an interview on Russia Today,
the Kremlin-controlled English-language propaganda channel — it was not
readily apparent.
Now,
Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks are back in the spotlight, roiling the
geopolitical landscape with new disclosures and a promise of more to
come.
In July, the organization released nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails
suggesting that the party had conspired with Hillary Clinton’s campaign
to undermine her primary opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders. Mr. Assange —
who has been openly critical of Mrs. Clinton — has promised further
disclosures that could upend her campaign against the Republican
nominee, Donald J. Trump. Separately, WikiLeaks announced that it would
soon release some of the crown jewels of American intelligence: a
“pristine” set of cyberspying codes.
United
States officials say they believe with a high degree of confidence that
the Democratic Party material was hacked by the Russian government, and
suspect that the codes may have been stolen by the Russians as well.
That raises a question: Has WikiLeaks become a laundering machine for
compromising material gathered by Russian spies? And more broadly, what
precisely is the relationship between Mr. Assange and Mr. Putin’s
Kremlin?
Those
questions are made all the more pointed by Russia’s prominent place in
the American presidential election campaign. Mr. Putin, who clashed
repeatedly with Mrs. Clinton when she was secretary of state, has
publicly praised Mr. Trump, who has returned the compliment, calling for
closer ties to Russia and speaking favorably of Mr. Putin’s annexation of Crimea.
From
the outset of WikiLeaks, Mr. Assange said he was motivated by a desire
to use “cryptography to protect human rights,” and would focus on
authoritarian governments like Russia’s.
But
a New York Times examination of WikiLeaks’ activities during Mr.
Assange’s years in exile found a different pattern: Whether by
conviction, convenience or coincidence, WikiLeaks’ document releases,
along with many of Mr. Assange’s statements, have often benefited
Russia, at the expense of the West.
Among
United States officials, the emerging consensus is that Mr. Assange and
WikiLeaks probably have no direct ties to Russian intelligence
services. But they say that, at least in the case of the Democrats’
emails, Moscow knew it had a sympathetic outlet in WikiLeaks, where
intermediaries could drop pilfered documents in the group’s anonymized
digital inbox.
In
an interview on Wednesday with The Times, Mr. Assange said Mrs. Clinton
and the Democrats were “whipping up a neo-McCarthyist hysteria about
Russia.” There is “no concrete evidence” that what WikiLeaks publishes
comes from intelligence agencies, he said, even as he indicated that he
would happily accept such material.
WikiLeaks
neither targets nor spares any particular nation, he added, but rather
works to verify whatever material it is given in service of the public,
which “loves it when they get a glimpse into the corrupt machinery that
is attempting to rule them.”
But
given WikiLeaks’ limited resources and the hurdles of translation, Mr.
Assange said, why focus on Russia, which he described as a “bit player
on the world stage,” compared with countries like China and the United
States? In any event, he said, Kremlin corruption is an old story.
“Every man and his dog is criticizing Russia,” he said. “It’s a bit
boring, isn’t it?”
“Every man and his
dog is criticizing Russia.
It’s a bit boring, isn’t it?”
Julian Assangedog is criticizing Russia.
It’s a bit boring, isn’t it?”
Since
its inception, WikiLeaks has succeeded spectacularly on some fronts,
uncovering indiscriminate killing, hypocrisy and corruption, and helping
spark the Arab Spring.
To
Gavin MacFadyen, a WikiLeaks supporter who runs the Center for
Investigative Journalism at the University of London, the question for
Mr. Assange is not where the material comes from, but whether it is true
and in the public interest. He noted that intelligence services had a
long history of using news organizations to plant stories, and that
Western news outlets often published “material that comes from the
C.I.A. uncritically.”
Recent
events, though, have left some transparency advocates wondering if
WikiLeaks has lost its way. There is a big difference between publishing
materials from a whistle-blower like Chelsea Manning — the soldier who
gave WikiLeaks its war log and diplomatic cable scoops — and accepting
information, even indirectly, from a foreign intelligence service
seeking to advance its own powerful interests, said John Wonderlich, the
executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a group devoted to
government transparency.
“They’re
just aligning themselves with whoever gives them information to get
attention or revenge against their enemies,” Mr. Wonderlich said.
“They’re welcoming governments to hack into each other and disrupt each
other’s democratic processes, all on a pretty weak case for the public
interest.”
Others
see Mr. Assange assuming an increasingly blinkered approach to the
world that, coupled with his own secrecy, has left them disillusioned.
“The
battle for transparency was supposed to be global; at least Assange
claimed that at the beginning,” said Andrei A. Soldatov, an
investigative journalist who has written extensively about Russia’s
security services.
“It
is strange that this principle is not being applied to Assange himself
and his dealings with one particular country, and that is Russia,” Mr.
Soldatov said. “He seems to think that one may compromise a lot fighting
a bigger evil.”
Support From Moscow
WikiLeaks
was just getting started in 2006 when Mr. Assange, an Australian
national, sent a mission statement to potential collaborators. One of
his goals, he said, was to help expose “illegal or immoral” behavior by
governments in the West.
Mr.
Assange made clear, though, that his main focus lay elsewhere. “Our
primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and
Central Eurasia,” he wrote.
Shortly
after releasing the war logs in 2010, Mr. Assange threatened to make
good on that promise. WikiLeaks, he told a Moscow newspaper, had
obtained compromising materials “about Russia, about your government and
your businessmen.”
But
Mr. Assange’s life was soon upended. On Nov. 20 of that year, an
international warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with
allegations of sexual assault in Sweden, which he denies. Eight days
later, WikiLeaks’ release of a cache of State Department cables cast
unvarnished — and unwelcome — light on the United States’ diplomatic
relationships.
“What is he persecuted
for? For sexual crimes?
Nobody believes that,
you do not believe
that either. He is
being persecuted for
spreading the information
he received from
U.S. military regarding
the actions of the
U.S.A. in the Middle
East, including Iraq.”
Vladimir V. Putinfor? For sexual crimes?
Nobody believes that,
you do not believe
that either. He is
being persecuted for
spreading the information
he received from
U.S. military regarding
the actions of the
U.S.A. in the Middle
East, including Iraq.”
As
Mr. Assange pointed out in the interview with The Times, many of the
cables involved blunt judgments on Russia; one called it a “mafia
state.” But the documents proved far more damaging to the United States’
interests than to Russia’s, and officials in Moscow seemed unperturbed.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, dismissed Mr. Assange as a
“petty thief running around on the internet.”
Mr.
Assange, asked soon after by Time magazine whether he still planned to
expose the secret dealings of the Kremlin, reiterated his earlier vow.
“Yes indeed,” he said.
But
that promised assault would not materialize. Instead, with Mr.
Assange’s legal troubles mounting, Mr. Putin would come to his defense.
In
late November 2010, United States officials announced an investigation
of WikiLeaks; Mrs. Clinton, whose State Department was scrambled by what
became known as “Cablegate,” vowed to take “aggressive” steps to hold
those responsible to account.
The
next month, Mr. Assange was arrested by the London police to face
questioning by the Swedes, who he feared would turn him over to the
Americans. Out on bail, he holed up and fought extradition at a Georgian
country house owned by a supporter, Vaughan Smith, who said in an
interview that he believed Mr. Assange to be the victim of an “intense
online bullying and disinformation” campaign.
One
day after Mr. Assange’s arrest, the Russian president appeared at a
news conference with the French prime minister. Brushing off a
questioner who suggested that the diplomatic cables portrayed Russia as
undemocratic, Mr. Putin used the opportunity to bash the West.
“As
far as democracy goes, it should be a complete democracy. Why then did
they put Mr. Assange behind bars?” he asked. “There’s an American
saying: He who lives in a glass house shouldn’t throw stones.”
Timeline
Julian Assange: A Legal History
Here are key points in his case since WikiLeaks burst onto the digital scene in 2010.
It
was the first of several times that Mr. Putin would take up Mr.
Assange’s cause. He has called the charges against Mr. Assange
“politically motivated” and declared that the WikiLeaks founder is being
“persecuted for spreading the information he received from the U.S.
military regarding the actions of the U.S.A. in the Middle East,
including Iraq.”
In
January 2011, the Kremlin issued Mr. Assange a visa, and one Russian
official suggested that he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Then, in
April 2012, with WikiLeaks’ funding drying up — under American pressure,
Visa and MasterCard had stopped accepting donations — Russia Today
began broadcasting a show called “The World Tomorrow” with Mr. Assange as the host.
How
much he or WikiLeaks was paid for the 12 episodes remains unclear. In a
written statement, Sunshine Press, which works as his spokesman, said
Russia Today “was among a dozen broadcasters that purchased a
broadcasting license for his show.”
But
on June 19, 2012, Mr. Assange’s narrative quickly took a different
turn. He broke bail after losing an appeal against extradition to Sweden
and was granted asylum in the tiny embassy of Ecuador in London,
overlooking the back of Harrods department store.
A World Divided
One
year later, a man who would soon eclipse Mr. Assange in terms of
whistle-blowing fame boarded a plane in Hong Kong. His name was Edward
J. Snowden, and he was a National Security Agency
contractor-turned-fugitive, having stunned the world and strained
American alliances by leaking documents that revealed a United
States-led network of global surveillance programs.
Mr.
Snowden had not given his thousands of classified documents to
WikiLeaks. Still, it was at the suggestion of Mr. Assange that the
flight Mr. Snowden boarded on June 23, 2013, accompanied by his
WikiLeaks colleague Sarah Harrison, was bound for Moscow, where Mr.
Snowden remains today after the United States canceled his passport en
route.
In
fact, worried that he would be seen as a spy, Mr. Snowden had hoped
merely to pass through Russia on his way to South America, Mr. Assange
later recounted, a plan he had not fully endorsed. Russia, he believed,
could best protect Mr. Snowden from a C.I.A. kidnapping, or worse.
“Now
I thought, and in fact advised Edward Snowden, that he would be safest
in Moscow,” Mr. Assange told the news program Democracy Now.
Years
earlier, during a November 2010 meeting with New York Times journalists
negotiating for access to the diplomatic cables, Mr. Assange had mused
about seeking refuge in Russia. Anticipating the likely fallout from the
cables’ release, Mr. Assange spoke of relocating to Russia and setting
up WikiLeaks there. His associates were openly skeptical of the idea,
given the Kremlin’s ruthless surveillance apparatus and tight control
over the news media.
That
Mr. Assange would now advise Mr. Snowden to travel that path is a
measure not just of his worldview, but also of his circumstances and
personality, friends and former colleagues say.
Suelette
Dreyfus, a longtime friend of Mr. Assange’s and an academic who studies
whistle-blowing, says his sole motivation is a deep-seated belief that
governments and other large and powerful institutions must be held in
check to safeguard the rights of individuals.
“This is not an East-West fight,” she said, though “it is being presented as such by people with an agenda.
But
even as other longtime supporters continue to see Mr. Assange as a
courageous crusader — “a moral individual in a world of mass societies,”
as one put it — they say he can be vain and childlike, with a tendency
to see the world as divided into those who support him and those who do
not.
During
his time isolated in the Ecuadorean Embassy, under constant
surveillance, his instinctive mistrust of the West hardened even as he
became increasingly numb to the abuses of the Kremlin, which he viewed
as a “bulwark against Western imperialism,” said one supporter, who like
many others asked for anonymity for fear of angering Mr. Assange.
Another
person who collaborated with WikiLeaks in the past added: “He views
everything through the prism of how he’s treated. America and Hillary
Clinton have caused him trouble, and Russia never has.”
The
result has been a “one-dimensional confrontation with the U.S.A.,”
Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who before quitting WikiLeaks in 2010 was one of
Mr. Assange’s closest partners, has said.
And
the beneficiary of that confrontation, played out in a series of public
statements by Mr. Assange and strategically timed document releases by
WikiLeaks, has often been Mr. Putin. While the release of the Democratic
Party documents appears to be the first time WikiLeaks has published
material that United States officials assert was stolen by Russian
intelligence, the agendas of WikiLeaks and Mr. Putin have repeatedly
dovetailed since Mr. Assange fled to the embassy.
Mr.
Assange has at times offered mild criticisms of the Putin government.
In a 2011 interview, for instance, he spoke of the “Putinization” of
Russia. On Twitter, he has also called attention to Pussy Riot, the punk
band whose members were jailed after taking on Mr. Putin.
But
for the most part, Mr. Assange has remained silent about some of the
Russian president’s harshest moves. It was Mr. Snowden, for instance,
not Mr. Assange, who took to Twitter
in July to denounce a law giving the Kremlin sweeping new surveillance
powers. Mr. Assange, asked during Wednesday’s interview about the new
law and others like it, acknowledged that Russia had undergone “creeping
authoritarianism.” But he suggested that “that same development” had
occurred in the United States.
Mr.
Assange has also taken a decidedly pro-Russian view of hostilities in
Ukraine, where the Obama administration has accused Mr. Putin of
supporting the separatists. The United States, Mr. Assange told an
Argentine newspaper in March of last year, has been the one meddling
there, fomenting unrest by “trying to draw Ukraine into the Western
orbit, to pluck it out of Russia’s sphere of influence.” After the
annexation of Crimea, he said Washington and its intelligence allies had
“annexed the whole world” through global surveillance.
Like
Mr. Trump, who stood to gain from the Democratic Party leak, Mr.
Assange supported Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, and he has
repeatedly gone after NATO — taking on two organizations that Mr. Putin
would like nothing more than to defang or dismantle.
In
September 2014, for instance, Mr. Assange wrote on Twitter about what
he called the “corrupt deal” that Turkey engineered to force the
suppression of a pro-Kurdish television station in Denmark in return for
allowing that country’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, to take
the helm of NATO.
The
timing of his Twitter post was curious on two fronts. It relied on a
diplomatic cable that had garnered headlines when WikiLeaks released it
four years earlier. And it followed a monthslong tit for tat between Mr.
Rasmussen and Mr. Putin, with the Russian president taking the NATO
chief to task for secretly recording their private conversation, and Mr.
Rasmussen accusing Mr. Putin of playing a “double game” in Ukraine by
issuing conciliatory statements while massing troops on the border and
shipping weapons to the separatists.
Mr.
Assange again recycled the story this past June — days after President
Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine named Mr. Rasmussen a special adviser —
this time via a video appearance at a Russian media forum attended by
Mr. Putin and timed to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the Soviet
Information Bureau.
Continue reading the main story
A Matter of Timing
Then
there are the leaks themselves. Some, such as hacked Church of
Scientology documents, are of no obvious benefit to the Russians. But
many are.
The
organization has published leaks of material from Saudi Arabia and
Turkey, which are United States allies, but also to varying degrees from
authoritarian regimes. The leaks came during times of heightened
tension between those countries and Russia.
The
Saudi documents, for instance, which highlighted efforts to manipulate
world opinion about the kingdom, were published months after Mr. Putin
accused the Saudis of holding down oil prices to harm the economies of
Russia and its allies Iran and Venezuela.
Another
set of leaks indirectly benefited Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned atomic
energy company. Those documents detailed a “corrupt multi-billion-dollar
war by Western and Chinese companies” — including Rosatom’s chief
competitors — to obtain uranium and other mining rights in the Central
African Republic.
WikiLeaks seems aware of a perception problem when it comes to Russia.
When
Russia Today began broadcasting Mr. Assange’s television program, he
joked in a statement that it would be used to “smear” him: “Assange is a
hopeless Kremlin stooge!”
And
Sunshine Press, the group’s public relations voice, pointed out that in
2012 WikiLeaks also published an archive it called the Syria files —
more than two million emails from and about the government of President
Bashar al-Assad, whom Russia is supporting in Syria’s civil war.
Yet
at the time of the release, Mr. Assange’s associate, Ms. Harrison,
characterized the material as “embarrassing to Syria, but it is also
embarrassing to Syria’s opponents.” Since then, Mr. Assange has accused
the United States of deliberately destabilizing Syria, but has not
publicly criticized human rights abuses by Mr. Assad and Russian forces
fighting there.
Many
of the documents WikiLeaks has published are classified, such as a
C.I.A. tutorial on how to maintain cover in foreign airports. But what
may be WikiLeaks’ most intriguing release of secret documents involved
what is, on the surface, a less sensational topic: trade negotiations.
From
November 2013 to May 2016, WikiLeaks published documents describing
internal deliberations on two trade pacts: the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, which would liberalize trade between the United States,
Japan and 10 other Pacific Rim countries, and the Trade in Services
Agreement, an accord between the United States, 21 other countries and
the European Union.
Russia,
which was excluded, has been the most vocal opponent of the pacts, with
Mr. Putin portraying them as an effort to give the United States an
unfair leg up in the global economy.
The
drafts released by WikiLeaks stirred controversy among
environmentalists, advocates of internet freedom and privacy, labor
leaders and corporate governance watchdogs, among others. They also
stoked populist resentment against free trade that has become an
important factor in American and European politics.
The material was released at critical moments, with the apparent aim of thwarting negotiations, American trade officials said.
WikiLeaks highlighted the domestic and international discord on its Twitter accounts.
American
negotiators assumed that the leaks had come from a party at the table
seeking leverage. Then in July 2015, on the day American and Japanese
negotiators were working out the final details of the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, came what WikiLeaks dubbed its “Target Tokyo” release.
Relying
on top-secret N.S.A. documents, the release highlighted 35 American
espionage targets in Japan, including cabinet members and trade
negotiators, as well as companies like Mitsubishi. The trade accord was
finally agreed on — though it has not been ratified by the United States
Senate — but the document release threw a wrench into the talks.
“The
lesson for Japan is this: Do not expect a global surveillance
superpower to act with honor or respect,” Mr. Assange said in a news
release at the time. “There is only one rule: There are no rules.”
Because
of the files’ provenance, United States intelligence officials assumed
that Mr. Assange had gotten his hands on some of the N.S.A. documents
copied by Mr. Snowden.
But
in an interview, Glenn Greenwald, one of the two journalists entrusted
with the full Snowden archive, said that Mr. Snowden had not given his
documents to WikiLeaks and that the “Target Tokyo” documents were not
even among those Mr. Snowden had taken.
The
same is true, Mr. Greenwald said, of another set of N.S.A. intercepts
released by WikiLeaks that showed that the United States bugged
conversations of United Nations officials and European allies, including
private climate-control talks between Chancellor Angela Merkel of
Germany and the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. On
Wednesday, Mr. Assange said he had his own separate sources for N.S.A.
material.
That
raises the question of whether another, still-secret, N.S.A.
whistle-blower is leaking documents to WikiLeaks, or whether the files
were obtained from the outside via a sophisticated cyberespionage
operation, possibly sponsored by a state actor. That question was
underscored by Mr. Assange’s statement a few weeks ago that he would
release the codes that the United States uses to hack others.
And that has some former collaborators questioning just who is giving Mr. Assange his information these days.
“It’s
not in his temperament to be a cat’s paw, and I don’t think he would
take anything overtly from the F.S.B.,” said one, referring to the
Russian intelligence agency. “He wouldn’t trust them enough. But if
someone could plausibly be seen as a hacker group, he’d be fine. He was
never too thorough about checking out sources or motivations.”
The Panama Papers
In
April of this year, the International Consortium of Investigative
Journalists unleashed a torrent of articles that reverberated around the
world.
Based
on 11.5 million leaked documents from a Panamanian law firm that
specialized in creating secretive offshore companies, the “Panama
Papers” offered a look inside a shadowy world in which banks, law firms
and asset management companies help the world’s rich and powerful hide
wealth and avoid taxes.
It
was the largest archive of leaked documents that journalists had ever
handled, and so it was no surprise that WikiLeaks initially linked to
the consortium’s work on Twitter. But what shocked some of the
journalists involved was what WikiLeaks did next.
Among
the biggest stories was one showing how billions of dollars had wound
up in shell companies controlled by one of Mr. Putin’s closest friends, a
cellist named Sergei P. Roldugin. Nearly a dozen news organizations,
including two of Russia’s last independent newspapers, Vedomosti and
Novaya Gazeta, had collaborated in tracing the money.
But
WikiLeaks seized on the contribution of just one: the Organized Crime
and Corruption Reporting Project. In a series of Twitter posts after the
revelations about Mr. Roldugin, WikiLeaks questioned the integrity of
the reporting, noting that the project had received grants from the
Soros Foundation and the United States Agency for International
Development.
copy http://www.nytimes.com/2
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