The FBI's WikiLeaks Mole

When he met Julian Assange for the first time, Sigurdur Thordarson admired the WikiLeaks founder’s attitude and quickly signed up to the cause. But little more than a year later, Thordarson was working as an informant spying on WikiLeaks for the US government — embroiling himself as a teenager in one of the most complicated international events in recent history.

In a series of interviews with Slate, Thordarson has detailed the full story behind how, in an extraordinary sequence of events, he went from accompanying Assange to court hearings in London to secretly passing troves of data on WikiLeaks staff and affiliated activists to the FBI. The 20-year-old Icelandic citizen’s account is partly corroborated by authorities in Iceland, who have confirmed that he was at the center of a diplomatic row in 2011 when a handful of FBI agents flew in to the country to meet with him — but were subsequently asked to leave after a government minister suspected they were trying to “frame” Assange.

Thordarson, who first outed himself as an informant in a Wired story in June, provided me with access to a pseudonymous email account that he says was created for him by the FBI. He also produced documents and travel records for trips to Denmark and the United States that he says were organized and paid for by the bureau.

The FBI declined to comment on Thordarson’s role as an informant or the content of the emails its agents are alleged to have sent him. In a statement, it said that it was “not able to discuss investigative tools and techniques, nor comment on ongoing investigations.” But emails sent by alleged FBI agents to Thordarson, which left a digital trail leading back to computers located within the United States, appear to shine a light on the extent of the bureau’s efforts to aggressively investigate WikiLeaks following the whistle-blower website’s publication of classified US military and State Department files in 2010.

Late last month, Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was convicted on counts of espionage, theft, and computer fraud for passing the group the secrets. During the Manning trial, military prosecutors portrayed Assange as an “information anarchist,” and now it seems increasingly possible that the US government may next go after the 42-year-old Australian for his role in obtaining and publishing the documents. For the past 14 months, Assange has been living in Ecuador’s London Embassy after being granted political asylum by the country over fears that, if he is sent to Sweden to face sexual offense allegations, he will be detained and subsequently extradited to the United States.

Meanwhile, for more than two years, prosecutors have been quietly conducting a sweeping investigation into WikiLeaks that remains active today. The FBI’s files in the Manning case number more than 42,000 pages, according to statements made during the soldier’s pretrial hearings, and that stack of proverbial paper likely continues to grow. Thordarson’s story offers a unique insight into the politically-charged probe: Information he has provided appears to show that there was internal tension within the FBI over a controversial attempt to infiltrate and gather intelligence on the whistle-blower group. Thordarson gave the FBI a large amount of data on WikiLeaks, including private chat message logs, photographs, and contact details of volunteers, activists, and journalists affiliated with the organization. Thordarson alleges that the bureau even asked him to covertly record conversations with Assange in a bid to tie him to a criminal hacking conspiracy. The feds pulled back only after becoming concerned that the Australian was close to discovering the spy effort.

*****

It was 2010 when the saga began in Reykjavik, Iceland. Thordarson, then just 17, says that before his first encounter with Assange, he knew little about the man beyond a few YouTube videos he’d watched about WikiLeaks. But he went to hear Assange speak at a conference hosted by an Icelandic university, and the teenager was impressed. After the event, a journalist Thordarson knew introduced him to Assange, and the pair struck up a relationship that led to Thordarson doing some volunteer work for the organization. Before long, he was on the edges of WikiLeaks’ small, tight-knit inner circle.

At that time, the group was sitting on the explosive files it had received from Manning that included a video showing a US helicopter attack that resulted in the deaths of 12 civilians, among them two employees of the Reuters news agency.

Thordarson, a blond-haired stocky figure with a baby face, was present while WikiLeaks staff and volunteers in Reykjavik were preparing the video for publication. When it was published by WikiLeaks in April 2010, under the name Collateral Murder, it catapulted the organization into the international spotlight and provoked an angry response from government officials in Washington.

The then-teenager, known as “Siggi” to his friends, was around at the height of that backlash. He was given administrative privileges to moderate an Internet chat room run by WikiLeaks. And when Assange relocated from Iceland to England, Thordarson came to visit. He even accompanied the WikiLeaks founder to court appearances in London as he fought extradition to Sweden over allegations of sexual assault.

Thordarson looked up to Assange, viewing him as a friend. The WikiLeaks chief, he says, treated him well — helping him find a lawyer in 2010, not long after the pair had met, when he says he was wrongly accused by Icelandic police of breaking into a business premises. But signs that Thordarson had a proclivity for brushes with the law did not appear to trigger alarm bells early on at WikiLeaks — though perhaps they should have, because he was certainly not any ordinary volunteer. Unlike many drawn to WikiLeaks, Thordarson does not seem to have been principally motivated by a passion for the cause of transparency or by the desire to expose government wrongdoing. Instead, he was on the hunt for excitement and got a thrill out of being close to people publishing secret government documents.

As a child, Thordarson led a fairly normal middle-class life in Reykjavik, enjoying social studies and chemistry at school. His father worked as a sales manager at a painting firm, and his mother ran a hair salon. But as he entered his teenage years, he says, he began to feel that he could not connect with others in his peer group. He went to college to study computer science and psychology — but claims he was suspended after hacking into a college computer system.

By mid-2011, Thordarson’s thirst for adventure, combined with his interest in hacking, would irreversibly complicate his relationship with WikiLeaks. In June of that year, the Anonymous-linked hacker group LulzSec brought down the website of the CIA. Thordarson says that he and other WikiLeaks staff were amused by the incident, and he decided to reach out to the hackers to establish contact. Thordarson claims that, using the aliases “Q” and “Penguin X,” he set up a line of communication between WikiLeaks and LulzSec. During the series of exchanges that followed, Thordarson says he “suggested” that his group wanted assistance to find evidence of anti-WikiLeaks sentiment within the Icelandic government’s Ministry of Finance, which had thwarted an attempt by DataCell, a company that processes WikiLeaks donations, to purchase a large new data center in Reykjavik. (In early 2011, DataCell’s founder questioned whether the Icelandic government had deliberately prevented the deal because it was “afraid of letting WikiLeaks here into the country.”)

“That was basically the first assignment WikiLeaks gave to LulzSec,” Thordarson alleges, “to breach the Icelandic government infrastructure.”

The Iraq War

American soldiers celebrated last month when President Obama announced the “end of the war” in Iraq. The nine-year conflict took a serious toll on the superpower, which led a coalition from across the world into what will be remembered as one of the most controversial and disastrous episodes in recent history. Over a trillion dollars are estimated to have been spent and more than 100,000 lives lost. For Obama, the departure of the last US troops on 18 December was a “moment of success”. But as the bombings and killings continue in their absence, it remains unclear quite what has been achieved.

From the outset the decision to go to war was contentious. In Europe, the purpose was to tackle the threat of weapons of mass destruction. The US was more explicit in its aim to remove Saddam Hussein. In the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks on 11 September 2001, there were fears that the threat was grave. Millions in cities from London to Japan took to the streets to protest, calling for a diplomatic solution, but the military invasion continued as planned.

Shock and awe were the words used to describe the war’s early stages in March 2003. For days capital city Baghdad was pounded relentlessly as thousands of bombs were dropped from British and American planes. In the first three months, an estimated 35,000 civilians died. There were no weapons of mass destruction, but the war, resisted fiercely by Iraqi militias and insurgents, did not cease. Saddam was captured and hung, while across Iraq gruelling and bloody battles ensued.

US political strategist Joe Trippi remembers the period well. In the build-up to the invasion he was working as national campaign manager for democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, who mounted the only major opposition campaign against the war. Trippi also served as an adviser to Tony Blair in 2005, and has since visited Iraq, where he helped Iraqis organise grassroots political campaigns.

“I still believe the war was a mistake,” he says, speaking over the phone from Maryland in eastern America. “But having done it, it was clear to me that things were not going to go well when we left. One of the problems is that there isn’t any heritage of holding elections – you know, how to organise a party, how to campaign, how to build a political party to build a democracy.”

While in northern Iraq last year – before US troop withdrawals – Trippi witnessed the presence of low level corruption. So long as US representatives were not present at security checkpoints, he noticed it was possible to pay Iraqi police to get through without being searched.

“Being someone who was against the war, against us having troops there, feeling responsibility for what would happen when we left, it was very disconcerting,” he says, adding that the visible presence of US nemesis Iran was equally unsettling. “It was very clear that Iran was trying to exert as much influence as possible... They [the Iranians] were everywhere, much more than any American influence I think, in terms of people on the ground.”

But continued US occupation may have only delayed the inevitable and resulted in more lives lost, Trippi believes. “It became clearer to me that, stay or leave, I feared I had been right. The war had been a blunder from the beginning.”

In the weeks since the final US troops left Iraq, a spate of sectarian violence has left hundreds dead, leading some to suggest that the country could now be on the brink of civil war. Though coalition forces are no longer present in the country, officials who cooperated with them are being targeted. Tensions between regional Sunni, Shia and Kurdish groups continue to rise, and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has flouted the country’s new constitution by trying to force his deputy, Saleh al-Mutlaq, out of office without the due process stipulated in law.

“Maliki may or may not be deliberately manoeuvring to make himself the new dictator of Iraq but his political instincts are very problematic regardless,” warned Kenneth Pollack, a prominent former US government intelligence analyst, in a recent article for Washington think-tank the Brookings Institution. “He is paranoid and prone to conspiracy theories. He is impatient with democratic politics and frequently interprets political opposition as a personal threat. And when faced with opposition, he often lashes out, seeing it as an exaggerated threat that must be immediately obliterated through any means possible, constitutional or otherwise.”

Last month an arrest warrant was issued for Iraq’s Sunni vice-president Tariq al-Hashemi – a fierce critic of al-Maliki – over allegations he has links to terrorists, prompting him to flee to the Kurdish-controlled north of the country and eliciting a statement of “surprise” from the president, Jalal Talabani. Amid the controversy, the Al-Iraqiya bloc, which represents most of the country’s Sunnis, staged a boycott of parliament, accusing al-Maliki of abusing his position.

The situation is volatile, according to Pollack, who was himself an initial advocate of the 2003 invasion. “The future of Iraq is hanging by a thread, but no one knows whether the thread will break, and if so, where the country will land. Civil war? A new, unstable dictatorship? A failed state? A messy partition? All of these are plausible scenarios and none of them will be happy outcomes for Iraq, for the region, or for the United States for that matter.”

David Siegel, professor of political science at Florida State University, thinks that the fate of the country will depend critically on the government being “sufficiently inclusive” of Iraq’s various minority groups. “Corruption must be minimised,” he says. “It also will depend on the degree to which the Iraqi people are able to maintain patience in the face of inevitable attacks.”

For ordinary Iraqis, over the course of the last nine years, violence has become an almost ever-present feature of everyday life. The departure of all foreign troops from their country will undoubtedly mark a new and historic chapter, and it is significant that a basic democratic framework in the form of an elected government is now established. But the grim reality is that, despite this, the country looks to be more unstable now than before the war began.

“It has already levelled out in a sense – it’s not really getting any better,” says Hamit Dardagan, co-founder of Iraq Body Count (IBC), an organisation that has monitored civilian casualties throughout the Iraq War. “It seems to have settled into this steady background level of violence. The first signs are that it is not going to go away because the US has left, as clearly there’s been a noticeable increase in violence just recently.”

IBC has documented 114,247 civilian casualties in Iraq between 2003-2011, a figure that includes over 3,900 children under the age of 18. A total of 4,802 soldiers – 93 per cent of them American – were also killed during the course of the war. Since US forces left Iraq in the week before Christmas, bombings have continued to be a weekly occurrence – with some of the worst violence in months inflamed by disputes between warring factions.

“Obviously US forces directly won’t be killing anyone anymore, but that doesn’t mean there won’t still be people getting killed because there are attacks going on,” Dardagan says. “The one thing about this is that it’s possible for the United States to bring war to Iraq – but the only people that can bring peace to Iraq is the Iraqis.”