How many people had even heard of WikiLeaks till recently? Or Julian Assange? Yet after the biggest intelligence leak of all time — the publication of more than 75,000 files amounting to an entire history of the Afghanistan war — he is in every newspaper, on every news broadcast, in what appears to be every country in the world. And WikiLeaks has seen the entrance on to the world stage of a remarkable new character: Assange, a man who, even friends and supporters admit, looks "a bit like a Bond villain".
But Assange didn't leak the material. He was not the source for these files, he merely published them. Where once the focus was on the whistle-blower, it is now on the technological conduit by which the whistleblower can reach the world.
What about the named sources? Might he have endangered their lives? "If there are innocent Afghans being revealed, which was our concern, which was why we kept back 15,000 files, then of course we take that seriously."
But what if it is too late? "Well, we will review our procedures."
Too late for the individuals, I say. Dead.
"Well, anything might happen but nothing has happened. And we aren't about to leave the field of doing good simply because harm might happen. In our four-year history, no one has ever come to physical harm that we are aware of or that anyone has alleged. On the other hand, we have changed governments and constitutions and had tremendous positive outcomes."
In the limelight
"We started off like The Economist," he recently told a packed audience at the Frontline Club, the journalists' club in London, meaning they retained complete anonymity. "We wanted to make the news, not be the news. But that produced extraordinary curiosity as to who we were ... this attempt not to be the news made us the news." This openness seems designed to counter one of the greatest criticisms of the organisation: its lack of accountability. Because what recent developments have made clear is that it is no longer governments that can choose what to keep secret, it is WikiLeaks.
Assange is a curious hybrid. His skills as a cryptographer led him to becoming one of the architects of the WikiLeaks model. But as Gavin MacFadyen, the director of the Centre of Investigative Journalism and a friend of his, points out, there is something almost old-fashioned about his particular brand of committed idealism.
"We don't really see people like him any more. They were around in the 1960s and 1970s. Those who are totally committed and passionate about what they're doing. But not after 20 years of Thatcherism." There was a video of Assange on the centre's website and "our server crashed", says MacFadyen. "He's an inspirational figure." He is also "probably the most intelligent person I've ever worked with" and has an "unusual amount of self-confidence".
When you interview Assange, this seems like an understatement. He is at least five steps ahead. Probably more. But then, as he told The New Yorker, what appealed to him about computers was their austerity: "It is like chess. Chess is very austere in that you don't have many rules, there is no randomness and the problem is very hard."
David Leigh, The Guardian's investigations editor who oversaw publication of the Afghan files, says Assange has the mentality of a hacker, "a distinct psychological genre". At times, he can seem almost autistic, although "he doesn't lack charm".
That is perhaps the most surprising thing about Assange. The first time I meet him, a fortnight before the publication of the files, he was tense and edgy. With good reason, it turns out. The second time, after a speaking engagement at the Frontline Club, he is like a man transformed: relaxed and clearly enjoying himself. The third time, he looks simply exhausted. And yet, he is also still quite clearly up for taking on all-comers.
Frontline Club director Vaughan Smith tells me he has more or less subsisted on "two hours' sleep and two sandwiches". But then, there is something about Assange that, if not superhuman, is almost as if he has found a way of simply dispensing with food and sleep. Combat, intellectual combat, seems to be his stimulant of choice. It just fuels him.
Change for the better
When I question him about the morality of what he has done, if he worries about unleashing something he can't control, that no one can control, he tells me the story of the Kenyan 2007 elections, when a WikiLeaks document "swung the election".
"About 1,300 people were killed and 350,000 displaced. That was a result of our leak," Assange says. It is a chilling statistic, but then he states: "On the other hand, Kenyans had a right to that information and 40,000 children die of malaria in Kenya every year. And many more die of money being pulled out of Kenya and as a result of the Kenyan shilling being debased."
It is the kind of moral conundrum that would unnerve most people, that made some wonder what the potential ramifications of the latest leak might be. But it is a subject on which Assange himself is absolutely clear: "You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion."
The other key thing about WikiLeaks is that it is internationalist in the true sense. "We do not have national security concerns. We have concerns about human beings," Assange says. And with its servers located in different countries and its headquarters nowhere, it raises intriguing questions about the future of nation states. Assange jumps on me pretty fast when I suggest as much. "Of course not. We have had over 100 legal attacks. We have been victorious in almost every single legal attack. As far as nation states are concerned, we operate within the rule of law."
But it is an organisation that has been brilliantly constructed to get around such assaults and with each release of information, it seems to evolve and grow stronger. Even if it is not yet known, can't be known, what the long-term impact of this particular leak will be.
Leigh describes Assange as "a mendicant friar of the electronic age". Like his organisation, he is global and rootless. Leigh also says "it's actually fairly irrelevant to talk about whether what Julian is doing is a bad thing or a good thing. Because if he wasn't doing it, somebody else would".
Assange and WikiLeaks are manifestations of a phenomenon, he says, not its root cause. "It's because the technology exists to create these enormous databases and because it exists, it can be leaked. And if it can be leaked, it will be leaked."
