WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and then-spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg in Germany, 2009. (Jacob Appelbaum/Flickr)
The time: January 2011. The location: Ellingham Hall, an elegant mansion northeast of London. The scene: Julian Assange sits in front of a fire, entertaining a visitor from America. The conversation is light at first, but as it turns serious, they stop talking and start passing messages jotted on pages torn from a notepad, tossing each in the fire after reading.
Assange is worried about something. It’s not his court battle to avoid extradition to Sweden. It’s not WikiLeaks’ continuing rollout of 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables. It’s not even the fate of his source, Bradley Manning (now Chelsea), locked in a Marine brig in Virginia under oppressive conditions. At this moment, Assange’s preoccupation is a tell-all book being penned by his former second-in-command, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, titled WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website — one of the two books that form the basis of the new movie The Fifth Estate.
The visitor was David House, a Boston computer scientist, a friend of Manning’s and a co-founder of the Private Manning Support Network. On this, his first visit with Assange, he was hoping to open a channel of communication between WikiLeaks and Manning supporters, and to try to secure a significant role for himself inside the secret-spilling organization.
Instead, he found Assange was mostly interested in talking about Domscheit-Berg’s betrayal of WikiLeaks.
“He had started to talk more and more about Daniel during those few days, telling anecdotes, and it was clear that it was bothering him,” House says. In front of the fireplace, Assange finally got to his point, House says. Assange wanted House “to protect the future of WikiLeaks by obtaining access to a ‘corpus of lies,’ or something like that,” House says.
In a follow-up conversation later, Assange got more explicit, House says.
“He wanted me, and in fact told me, to get to Berlin … and obtain access to Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s apartment and to get access to the manuscript of the book that was being published, and to take this manuscript with me back to the London so he could see it before it came out,” says House, publicly discussing his experience for the first time.
What followed, by House’s account, was one of the more bizarre sideshows in the WikiLeaks drama: a feigned attempt by House to steal the manuscript and satisfy Assange of his loyalty.
Assange’s preoccupation with his public portrayal is not in doubt. In the week leading up to yesterday’s U.S. opening of The Fifth Estate, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed became a steady stream of negative reviews of the film. In September, Assange even posted a leaked copy of the screenplay, with pages of scathing commentary. A similar campaign accompanied last spring’s unauthorized documentary on WikiLeaks, We Steal Secrets. But the allegation that Assange solicited a burglary is something new.
“You know, Julian referred to me once as his ‘adversary,’ so it might make sense in his little world of games to do something like that,” Domscheit-Berg says. “It’s a new low.”
Reached by phone Friday, WikiLeaks representative Kristinn Hrafnsson said he would ask Assange about the allegation, but by press time WikiLeaks had no response.
The allegations might seem preposterous, except that they come from one of the most important supporters of WikiLeaks’ biggest source: Manning.
David House met Manning casually in January 2010 at a party at Boston University’s hacker space. After Manning was arrested four months later as the WikiLeaks leaker, House began visiting Manning in jail and publicly campaigning for the Army private’s release; he co-founded the Private Manning Support Network, which ultimately raised $1.4 million for Manning’s defense, spoke at rallies around the country, made numerous media appearances, and was first to alert the press to Manning’s harsh confinement conditions at Quantico.
“He did really great media, especially while Manning was being subjected to the torture-like conditions at Quantico,” says Jeff Patterson of the Private Manning Support Network. “Having someone in front of the TV camera saying, ‘I personally saw this man and what they were doing to him’ was invaluable.”
House’s connections to Manning made him a target himself, and in November 2010, U.S. Customs officials detained him at the airport as he returned from a vacation to Mexico, seizing his computer, cell phone and digital camera (With the ACLU’s help, House later sued the government and won a settlement last May that forced the U.S. to delete the files it had taken from his computer.)
After the airport incident, House began privately pressing WikiLeaks for a face-to-face meeting with Assange, arguing that WikiLeaks and Manning supporters should coordinate their efforts. House’s insistence on a personal meeting made at least one WikiLeaks activist wary, according to internal chat logs previously leaked to WIRED, and Assange was advised against the meeting.
“My personal opinion is something’s fishy about this. All of a sudden when you are being hunted he wants to meet with you?” wrote WikiLeaks activist Sigurdur Thordarson, who, ironically, would later become an FBI informant. “What do you think?”
“I think he’s legit,” Assange replied. “Too weird not to be.”
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