Wiki-Espionage

The heart of the espionage business is the theft of secret documents. Up until the computer age, this was usually done either by stealing the documents themselves or copying them,. One of the most massive thefts of top secrets of top secret documents occurred in November 1979 when Iranian students captured the US embassy in Tehran before security officers could destroy the tens of thousands of classified CIA and State Department documents stored there. Even many of those that had been shredded into thin strips were painstakingly pieced together by the Iranian intelligence service. These stolen documents covered a vast range of covert CIA activities over two decades in both friendly and hostile nations, including everything from spying operations in the Soviet Union to the secret CIA and Saudi financing of the Jihad in Afghanistan. They also revealed extremely sensitive US espionage operations against allies including Israel, Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait as well as juicy gossip about sex lives of politicians. In 1982, to embarrass the United States, the Iranians published a large number of these stolen documents in 54 volumes entitled "Documents From the U.S. Espionage Den." Despite the revelations they provided about the activities of American intelligence, and their ready availability, no major newspaper in the United States, including the New York Times, lent credibility to them by publishing a single document from them. Nor were there any front page news stories about them. Except for the few scholars who ordered the 54 volumes for $248, this huge archive of top secret documents attracted little public notice.

In 2010, another huge archive of secret documents was made available. These classified documents did not accidentally leak onto the Internet through the work of some mischievous Internet hacker. Indeed, they were not even on the Internet. They were intentionally stolen from a private Defense Department network, the so-called “intranet.” The perp allegedly was a 23 year old US Army intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning, who had the clearances necessary to use this private network. If so, the operation was not conceptually different than that of Robert Hanssen, the KGB mole inside the FBI, who, among other things, broke into the private FBI computer network. Both were break-ins aimed at acquiring state secrets, which is, by any definition, espionage. The US Army intelligence analyst allegedly provided the fruits of his theft to an organization called Wiki-leaks, whose founder Julian Assange termed him a “hero.” Wiki-Leaks, in turn, made the fruits of this espionage available to the press, as had the Iranians with their stolen documents. The difference was that Julian Assange, unlike the Iranians, managed to negotiate arrangements with a number of leading news organizations, including the New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian in which they would get advance access to the stolen documents in return for not publishing them before a designated date. As a result the Wiki-leaks had simultaneous front page stories in many of the world’s most prestigious publication. Such stories may have had great value to media, and even helped enhance their circulation, but what they were publishing, and lending their credibility to, was not Wiki-leaks but Wiki- Espionage.