Some of the journalists who, at the end of 2010, worked with the largest leak of documents to which Morning Express had had access to date did not even know that basement located on the -1 floor of the newspaper’s headquarters in Madrid. On November 1 of that year, the eccentric Australian editor Julian Assange, co-founder of the leak portal Wikileaks, had invited the newspaper to join Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde and Der Spiegel in a macro investigation with thousands of US diplomatic cables. Three floors below the newsroom, a team with dozens of reporters was set up, many of them arriving modestly from correspondents from half the world, without even knowing what they were facing.
We had to work against the clock to unravel some of the secrets of American foreign policy before the November 28 publication date. What happened there was an unparalleled collaborative effort between journalists and international media. The Wikileaks phenomenon, shaken today by the release of Assange following an agreement with the United States Department of Justice by which the exhacker assumes having violated the law, had reached its peak, a pike in Flanders for a new time in leaks and investigative journalism.
The material that Wikileaks made available to these newspapers, and for which Washington has pursued Assange for more than a decade, was such that it forced the establishment of mechanisms to guarantee the total confidentiality of the project. No one, either inside or outside that basement, could know what it was about. The documents, more than 250,000 telegrams from the State Department, could only be worked on in that room and never be allowed to leave its doors. Communication with Assange’s team, then 39 years old, was done through an encrypted messaging system. A method that some newsrooms were not used to at the time, but which more than 13 years later is being approached more naturally.
Morning Express was the last of the five media outlets involved to receive the papers. The challenge, in just a few weeks, was enormous. The project management needed to involve a technical team so that those thousands of plain text files, the telegrams, were digestible by journalists. The newspapers had to deal with the pressures and versions of the party involved, the Barack Obama Administration. The Wikileaks portal was also a victim of computer hacking. Finally, a distribution error led to some copies of the German magazine Der Spiegel to the newsstands ahead of time. The launch had to be brought forward.
Research on the Internet
At seven in the afternoon, the information that has kept Assange behind bars for the last few years was in the air. She talked about espionage, hidden maneuvers and corruption; of leaders such as the Russian Vladimir Putin, the Venezuelan Hugo Chávez, the Iranian Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Frenchman Nicolas Sarkozy, the Chinese Hu Jintao, the Italian Silvio Berlusconi, the German Angela Merkel… He also set another precedent: a historical exclusive was published first of all on the internet. The Internet was the habitat of Assange, editor, journalist and hackerand that was where many of their leaks hit first.
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It was neither Wikileaks’ first nor its last success. The portal created in 2006, by Assange and who was then his closest collaborator, the German cyberactivist Daniel Schmitt (pseudonym of Daniel Domscheit-Berg), had already aired thousands of US papers on the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. In April 2010, a few months before Assange shared the diplomatic papers, the website published the video recorded by a US helicopter during an attack in Baghdad in which 11 Iraqis were killed, including a photographer from the Reuters agency. A year after this, still with the hangover after the launch of the diplomatic telegrams, Morning Express was once again a participant in a new leak from the portal, in this case, of more than 700 files on the Guantánamo prison.
The information artillery that Wikileaks had was already directly proportional to the shadows that were beginning to govern the figure of Assange. One of the working maxims in what was known as Cablegate, signed by the five newspapers, was to protect the safety of the people mentioned in the event that the appearance of their name posed a risk. That’s how it was done. However, almost a year after the State Department papers were published, in September 2011, the Australian publisher decided to publish all the telegrams without protecting the sources. The five newspapers that received the leak signed a statement condemning it, a first crack in the collaboration between Assange and the press.
In parallel to the Wikileaks leaks, the judicial persecution against the Australian began, first for two accusations of sexual assault in Sweden and, later, through the great espionage case opened in the United States by the Cablegate. Some of Assange’s closest collaborators, such as Domscheit-Berg or the Icelanders Birgitta Jónsdottir and Herbert Snorrason, left the project due to disagreements with him. Morning Express was in contact with the three during those years. Although they did not share its management – Domscheit-Berg and Snorrason launched a new project, OpenLeaks, without success – they always condemned the judicial crusade against them.
The work in 2010 of these five newspapers with the State Department telegrams provided by Wikileaks served, at least, two things: firstly, to open the door again to the so-called whistleblowers either deep throatswhistleblowers who, like soldier Chelsea Manning, the source of this macro-leak, want to make public the illicit activities of the organisation they work for – the European Union approved a directive for the protection of these people at the end of 2019.
Secondly, the Cablegate launched a new era of collaborative journalism among major media outlets, a priori competitors, to work on research projects. Manning was followed in 2013 by Edward Snowden, a former US analyst for the NSA spy agency who leaked information about the US global surveillance program to newspapers. Guardian and Washington Post. Three years later, another media alliance published the so-called Panama Papers based on documents from a Panamanian law firm specialized in tax havens. The analysis of this leak had the collaboration of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
In 2021, the ICIJ coordinated, with the collaboration of a team from Morning Express, together with journalists from 17 countries, the investigation of a leak of 11.9 million internal files on opaque taxation, the Pandora Papers, one of the best examples to date of this new panorama of leaks and investigation with which Wikileaks and Assange shook journalism that November 2010, from the basement of the newsroom to the entire world.
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