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.”

Menwith Hill

Situated awkwardly in the heart of rolling green English countryside is the United States’ largest overseas intelligence station. Surrounded by farmland and sheep, hundreds of National Security Agency staff go to work every day at RAF Menwith Hill, where they eavesdrop on communications intercepted by satellite dishes contained in about 30 huge golf ball-like domes.

Used by the NSA since the 1960s, Menwith Hill is an important spy center. But there is growing disquiet in Britain over whether intelligence gathered at the base is being used to help with the CIA’s controversial clandestine drone strikes. And the government is keeping mum.

Earlier this month, Ken Macdonald, former chief prosecutor for England and Wales, spoke out on the subject in an interview with the London Times. He told the newspaper he believed there was compelling evidence that Britain was providing the United States with information subsequently used to help with drone attacks in countries like Pakistan. Because the United Nations says that the CIA’s covert drone campaign possibly violates international law, the allegation was politically explosive. The implication is that the British government could itself be complicit in unlawful drone bombings, which in Pakistan alone since 2004 have killed up to an estimated 3,337 people, among them hundreds of civilians.

Prior to Macdonald thrusting the issue into the spotlight, it had been simmering for some time. In May, a Pakistani student whose father was killed in a suspected U.S. drone attack launched legal action against the British government in a bid to expose whether it hands over intelligence for drone attacks on terrorist suspects. And a study published in March claimed the Menwith Hill base was being expanded to “support 'real-time' U.S. military actions, including drone attacks and those carried out by special operations forces.”

What goes on inside the Menwith station is impossible to know for sure. However, according to a 2001 European Parliament report, it is part of a surveillance network called ECHELON, situated to intercept communications routed over the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Former NSA employee Margaret Newsham, who worked at Menwith Hill 20 years ago, told CBS it monitored Russian and Chinese communications (but on one occasion spied on U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond). And the Federation of American Scientists has claimed it is capable of intercepting an astonishing two million communications an hour.

If these reported capabilities are correct, it seems highly plausible that the base’s satellites are today intercepting at least some communications from the Middle East — which could help how the CIA picks its targets for drone strikes in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

It’s also plausible that any intercepts gathered at Menwith play a crucial — not just contributory — role. In April, the Washington Post revealed that the White House had approved drone strikes in Yemen based solely on intelligence signatures. These are defined, according to the Post, as patterns of behavior indicative of a plot against U.S. interests “detected through signals intercepts, human sources and aerial surveillance.”

This brand of intelligence-led warfare has already led Germany to limit information it shares with the United States. The British government, however, does not take the same position — and is contributing to the secrecy that surrounds drone operations.

Fabian Hamilton, a member of the British Parliament, asked the government earlier this month whether Menwith Hill plays a role in the planning and deployment of drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The response? He was not permitted to know. “For operational and security reasons we do not comment on the specific activities carried out at RAF Menwith Hill,” said Andrew Robathan, minister of state for the armed forces.

The secrecy is a problem, for basic democratic reasons if nothing else. It’s obvious that the British government wants to protect Menwith Hill’s activities on national security grounds, which might be justifiable to some extent. But if a foreign military is using a base in the English countryside to help conduct covert wars in far-flung lands, that’s a different matter altogether — and surely the British public has a right to know about it.

This article first appeared at Slate.com