Sanity can be a little dull sometimes, but it’s far preferable to its opposite. Someone once said that the daily news was simply a report of what all the people with personality disorders had been doing that day.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s Inside Wikileaks is an insider account of the author’s three years with the secretive organisation whose publishing of US diplomatic cables and the infamous Collateral Murder video led to the arrest of Private Bradley Manning. It reveals the story behind the rise and fall from grace of Wikileaks’s charismatic founder, Julian Assange, and the explosive high-level leaks that dominated headlines for months and set the US Government and Assange on a collision course.
Accused by two women of sexual assault in August 2010, Assange has since been battling a February 2011 decision by English courts to extradite him to Sweden to be questioned in relation to the assault investigation. After a prolonged falling out with Assange, Domscheit-Berg left the organisation in September 2010, taking Wikileaks’s site architect with him (and the architect's infrastructure plans) to pursue a new initiative, OpenLeaks.
If you’ve been following the story of the accusations against Assange and found it difficult to decide on a position – is he good or evil? Is he a rapist or was it a case of sexual bad manners? – this book is a must. If you’ve been a little seduced by Assange’s quietly spoken intensity, his sometimes professorial hair and endearing lisp, and secretly wondered whether he is some kind of hippy saint, this book will contextualise your confusion. It argues what was already evident to many – that Assange is brilliant, pioneering, courageous, workaholic and extremely flawed.
In his love affair with the media, Julian Assange bears some comparison with Princess Diana. An early photograph of the princess staring enthralled into the lens of a paparazzo reveals a deep engagement with and interest in the attention. Long before I read this book, I remember watching a clip in which Assange and Domscheit-Berg gave a joint presentation at a computer conference. Domscheit-Berg was addressing the audience, in his rather monotone voice, about the work of Wikileaks. As he mentioned a recent victory, Assange raised a clenched fist in a gesture of triumph, and chuckled as the crowd responded appreciatively. The gesture, while a response to what Domscheit-Berg was saying, also took attention from it, and I wondered whether Assange was, at the time of the address, already addicted to the adulation he received as an outlaw celebrity.
This book is part doomed bromance, part tell-all expose. It's a translation, and the tone is lucid and verging on the pedestrian. Domscheit-Berg is at pains to explain that, for much of the time during which Wikileaks emerged as an organisation to be reckoned with, he himself was not merely an ‘employee’ but the joint spokesperson for the project along with Assange and an integral part of its development and growing success. The book traces Domscheit-Berg’s initial infatuation with Assange and his growing disillusionment as he comes to understand the extent of the man’s failings and begins to question his management of Wikileaks. Domscheit-Berg ultimately paints Assange as a paranoid megalomaniac who at one point threatens to destroy him, makes sinister statements such as ‘I will not tolerate disloyalty in [times of] crisis’, is astonishly lax about security and conceals the details of the organisation’s financial affairs; yet for most of the book the author is as weak as the most besotted relationship addict in his inability to let go.
In his love affair with the media, Julian Assange bears some comparison with Princess Diana. An early photograph of the princess staring enthralled into the lens of a paparazzo reveals a deep engagement with and interest in the attention. Long before I read this book, I remember watching a clip in which Assange and Domscheit-Berg gave a joint presentation at a computer conference. Domscheit-Berg was addressing the audience, in his rather monotone voice, about the work of Wikileaks. As he mentioned a recent victory, Assange raised a clenched fist in a gesture of triumph, and chuckled as the crowd responded appreciatively. The gesture, while a response to what Domscheit-Berg was saying, also took attention from it, and I wondered whether Assange was, at the time of the address, already addicted to the adulation he received as an outlaw celebrity.
This book is part doomed bromance, part tell-all expose. It's a translation, and the tone is lucid and verging on the pedestrian. Domscheit-Berg is at pains to explain that, for much of the time during which Wikileaks emerged as an organisation to be reckoned with, he himself was not merely an ‘employee’ but the joint spokesperson for the project along with Assange and an integral part of its development and growing success. The book traces Domscheit-Berg’s initial infatuation with Assange and his growing disillusionment as he comes to understand the extent of the man’s failings and begins to question his management of Wikileaks. Domscheit-Berg ultimately paints Assange as a paranoid megalomaniac who at one point threatens to destroy him, makes sinister statements such as ‘I will not tolerate disloyalty in [times of] crisis’, is astonishly lax about security and conceals the details of the organisation’s financial affairs; yet for most of the book the author is as weak as the most besotted relationship addict in his inability to let go.
Domscheit-Berg initially heard about Assange through his involvement in a community of computer activists in his native Germany. At the time of their first meeting, at a conference in Berlin December 2007, the author was stuck in a corporate IT job that did not satisfy his need for meaningful work. ‘Something was missing from my life in those years’, he recalls. He writes with affection of his first meeting with Julian: ‘My first thought on seeing him was: Cool guy’. Later he asserts: ‘right from the start I had the feeling that we were a pretty awesome team’.
Domscheit-Berg became active in Wikileaks and soon discovered it was a much smaller organisation than Assange had portrayed it, punching way above its weight. Eventually he left his job to work for Wikileaks full time, and was involved in crucial aspects such as developing its technical infrastructure, creating agreements with journalists from the mainstream press to publish leaked material, and soliciting donations. As the project gained momentum and notoriety, the wheels began to spin out of control.
The sense that the project had gotten too big too quickly and was technically unable to protect its sources is one of the reasons Domscheit-Berg says he wrote the book – he remains concerned about the organisation and, as someone who failed to speak up about his concerns sooner, feels responsible to those who trusted him. He raises some disturbing questions about Wikileaks in the wake of the fallout: without the work of ‘the architect’, is it a trustworthy organisation, and does it have a future? From his account, OpenLeaks sounds like not so much an offshoot of Wikileaks but a splinter group.
The subject matter of the book might verge on the tabloid at times, but, true to Domscheit-Berg’s somewhat phlegmatic personality, the tone rarely veers beyond the exasperated – Julian threatening to ruin Domscheit-Berg’s vintage couch with his grotty eating habits, Julian bringing women to the hotel for sex in the double bed that he shared with his colleague as the latter tries to sleep, Julian tormenting the author’s beloved cat, Mr Schmitt, for amusement. At the same time he willingly acknowledges Assange’s brilliance and the complexity that made him as compelling as he was impossible: ‘On the one hand I found Julian unbearable and on the other hand unbelievably special and lovable ... utterly committed to ... changing the world for the better’. Just as Levin’s marriage to Kitty forms the counterpoint to Anna’s journey towards romantic doom in the tragedy of Anna Karenina, Domscheit-Berg’s own blossoming personal life forms the counterpoint to the Wikileaks wild ride and Assange’s eventual derailment.
Above all the book questions the need for someone in Assange’s position to be assigned, or to assign himself, rock star status. It calls into question the media coverage of Assange that presents him as a romanticised lone wolf hunted by CIA baddies and surfing the couches of Europe for his own safety. Some of the revelations have an ‘He’s not the messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy’ flavour, such as Julian’s decision to start travelling with bodyguards, which was, Domscheit-Berg implies, grandiose. ‘At some point, I began to think that the worst of all scenarios would be for me to get arrested before he did’, he writes. But he never attacks Assange for the sake of it: while the book puts the lie to the supposition that the charges against Assange were politically motivated, Domscheit-Berg suggests that they were probably nothing more than a case of sexual bad manners.
In these days of personality politics, it would be easy to label stories such as this one as worthless gossip and thus malign them by associating them with the feminine. But the personal aspects of this story are important, because the Wikileaks picture would be incomplete without them. The question that kept nagging me as I read, especially as it became clear that Domscheit-Berg had stayed with Wikileaks long after Assange had decisively rejected him, was: Why did he hang around after the fallout? The answer is undoubtedly emotional investment, both in the project and the relationship with Assange, which Domscheit-Berg has agreed in an interview was at one point like ‘a marriage’. He had also invested his own money and much unpaid time to the project.
In these days of personality politics, it would be easy to label stories such as this one as worthless gossip and thus malign them by associating them with the feminine. But the personal aspects of this story are important, because the Wikileaks picture would be incomplete without them. The question that kept nagging me as I read, especially as it became clear that Domscheit-Berg had stayed with Wikileaks long after Assange had decisively rejected him, was: Why did he hang around after the fallout? The answer is undoubtedly emotional investment, both in the project and the relationship with Assange, which Domscheit-Berg has agreed in an interview was at one point like ‘a marriage’. He had also invested his own money and much unpaid time to the project.
That he did hang around for so long is to the reader’s advantage, because we hear the inside story of the leaks that led to Wikileaks becoming a world phenomenon: not only the diplomatic cables and Collateral Murder but the Afghan War Diaries and other highly significant leaks that did not receive the media attention they deserved.
The book also offers fascinating insights into the world view of globalised technology activists. Here is a loose group of utopians who travel the globe attending communitarian conferences, and envisage a world transformed by unfettered access to information. There are also revelations about the initual amateurishness of the Wikileaks project, bouyed as it was by Assange’s self-confidence and front.
Inside Wikileaks is clearly an attempt by Domscheit-Berg to defend himself as well as to tell his version of the Wikileaks story. He has said that a major reason for writing the book is because other, less well-informed, sources have, or are planning to, put forward inaccurate versions. He also seems keen to pre-empt Assange’s criticisms of him; the latter has reportedly received an advance of more than $1 million for the rights to publish his autobiography. Since the publication of the book, Domscheit-Berg has been denigrated in some quarters as a pro-establishment right-winger who has ridden on the coat tails of Assange’s brilliance and is now eating out on the back of his character assassination.
But the fact remains that ‘the architect’, a key figure in Wikileaks, chose to go with him to set up Openleaks rather than remaining with the charismatic Assange. And transcripts of strained chat room conversations between Assange and Domscheit-Berg do lend credence to the latter's assertion that Assange had megalomaniac, not to mention messianic, tendencies. As well, Domscheit-Berg's persona, both in the book and media interviews, does not seem dominated by egoism; in this book he freely, even breezily, admits his own mistakes.
Nice guys may come last but perhaps their works ultimately endure for longer. Domscheit-Berg was saddened and disillusioned when he left Wikileaks. If you currently look up to Assange as a freedom fighter, this account may leave you feeling the same way. Of course, it's ultimately subjective; Domscheit-Berg seems to be a reliable if phlegmatic source, but he is only one source, and he has an axe to grind, and his own reputation to maintain. The complete account is yet to come and may be many years away. It will be fascinating to read Assange’s autobiography, in particular his likely riposte to this complex, highly critical portrait.
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