Does Russia Benefit When Assange Reveals Secrets?
Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are back in the spotlight, roiling the geopolitical landscape with new disclosures and a promise of more to come.
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 super bully: 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 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, 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 cyber spying 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 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 recently with The Times, Mr. Assange said Mrs. Clinton and the Democrats were “whipping up a neo-McCarthyism 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?”
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.
Others see Mr. Assange assuming an increasingly blinkered approach to the world that, coupled with his own secrecy, has left them disillusioned.
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.
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.
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 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.
Recently Assange said he had his own separate sources for NSA material.
That raises the question of whether another, still-secret, NSA 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.
WikiLeaks did collaborate with journalists on the war logs and diplomatic cables. But Mr. Assange’s decision to abandon that approach in the name of total transparency is what led Snowden to work with Greenwald and another journalist on the NSA revelations. Mr. Snowden felt openness should be balanced with concern for people’s privacy and safety.
After the release of the Democratic Party documents this summer, Mr. Snowden criticized WikiLeaks on Twitter for not redacting the Social Security numbers and credit card information of private individuals named in the trove.
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.
