Kyiesha blog

NY Times editor reveals difficult dealings with Assange

Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, told The Cutline yesterday that the paper isfor potential leakers.

That's probably a good idea, since it's unlikely WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange will fork over any secret documents following . (Keller's lengthy piece is an excerpt from a forthcoming Times e-book, "Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy," that drops on Jan. 31)

Some tensions between the Times and WikiLeaks have already spilled out in public. In October, Assange for its coverage of him and alleged leaker Private Bradley Manning. The following month, The Timesof the diplomatic cables it based its reporting on. Indeed, the Guardian

Vanity Fair's Sarah Ellison alreadyon The Guardian's stormy relationship with WikiLeaks over the past year. Now Keller offers the Times's account of what it's like to collaborate--or try to--with Julian Assange. (Perhaps Assange will have the last word. Shortly after the Times piece went online, CBS announced that he'll appear Sunday on "60 Minutes.")

Keller begins with a June phone call. The Guardian had made an agreement with Assange, and the paper's editor, Alan Rusbridger, wanted to get the Times in on the trove of classified documents. Keller notes that the Times didn't have a secure line, as Rusbridger requests, but the two editors got the ball rolling.

"By the end of the year, the story of this wholesale security breach had outgrown the story of the actual contents of the secret documents and generated much breathless speculation that something journalism, diplomacy, life as we know it had profoundly changed forever," Keller wrote.

News organizations such as the Times and Guardian along with Der Spiegel, Al Jazeera, El Pais and others would help amplify the many about theand Afghanistan, together with other bombshell revelations about the conduct of high-level international diplomacy that could be found in the cache of secret documents.

Here are a few nuggets from Keller's first-person piece on dealing with Assange and some of the issues that came up while reporting out the three megaleaks last year.

On Assange: Keller described Assange as "a source who was elusive, manipulative and volatile (and ultimately openly hostile to The Times and The Guardian)" and later, "a man who clearly had his own agenda." The Times editor also describes what reporters dealing with Assange in London thought of him: "smart and well educated, extremely adept technologically but arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous."

Inside the Times before : He writes: "An air of intrigue verging on paranoia permeated the project, perhaps understandably, given that we were dealing with a mass of classified material and a source who acted like a fugitive, changing crash pads, e-mail addresses and cellphones frequently. We used encrypted Web sites. Reporters exchanged notes via Skype, believing it to be somewhat less vulnerable to eavesdropping. On conference calls, we spoke in amateurish code. Assange was always 'the source.' The latest data drop was 'the package.' When I left New York for two weeks to visit bureaus in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where we assume that communications may be monitored, I was not to be copied on message traffic about the project…."

Inside the government before release: Keller describes talking to the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke at a party: "A voracious consumer of inside information, Holbrooke had a decent idea of what was coming, and he pulled me away from the crowd to show me the fusillade of cabinet-level e-mail ricocheting through his BlackBerry, thus demonstrating both the frantic anxiety in the administration and, not incidentally, the fact that he was very much in the loop."

Relationship with Assange falls apart after release: "I talked to Assange by phone a few times and heard out his complaints. He was angry that we declined to linkto the , a decision we made because we feared rightly, as it turned out that its trove would contain the names of low-level informants and make them Taliban targets. 'Where's the respect?' he demanded. 'Where's the respect?' " Later, Assange voiced his concerns with profiles of Manning and himself.

One meeting with government officials: Keller wrote that before publication of articles related to the diplomatic cables, Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet took a meeting with "representatives from the White House, the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI and the Pentagon" all at one conference table.

Assange demands apology: The Guardian agreed not to share the diplomatic cables with the Times, but after obtaining them from a source outside WikiLeaks, the British paper's editors felt that they no longer had to comply with the earlier agreement and passed them along. On Nov. 1, Assange and his lawyers had a tense meeting over this in Rusbridger's office. Keller writes: "Over the course of an eight-hour meeting, Assange intermittently raged against The Timesespecially over our front-page profilewhile The Guardian journalists tried to calm him. In midstorm, Rusbridger called me to report on Assange's grievances and relay his demand for a front-page apology in The Times. Rusbridger knew that this was a nonstarter, but he was buying time for the tantrum to subside."

On prosecuting WikiLeaks: Keller writes that it's "chilling to contemplate thefor making secrets public, let alone the passage of new laws to punish the dissemination of classified information, as some have advocated."

(Cover courtesy of the New York Times)