American officials monitored pro-Assange protests in Australia for “anti-US sentiment”, warned of “increasing sympathy, particularly on the left” for the WikiLeaks founder in his home country and derided local media’s “sensationalist” reporting of the explosive 2010 cable leaks, previously classified records show.
Documents released by the US state department via freedom of information laws give new insight into how the US embassy in Canberra and its security team reacted to WikiLeaks’ release of 250,000 embassy cables in late 2010.
They show the embassy’s regional security office (RSO) monitoring and reporting on pro-WikiLeaks rallies held across Australian capital cities, feeding information to Washington via the embassy.
“The demonstrations have all been peaceful and generally numbers in the range of a few hundred persons. Embassy RSO notes the rallies have featured very little, if any, anti-American sentiment,” the US embassy cable, dated 17 December 2010, reads. “Wikileaks supporters held a recent demonstration in Canberra’s central business district and made no attempt to march to the US Embassy or direct any ire at other American interests.”
The cable also gives an appraisal on the level of sympathy held for Assange in Australia.
“Assange is gaining increasingly sympathy particularly on the left,” it reads.
Embassy officials also derided local media coverage of the 2010 cables as “sensationalist” and unserious.
The embassy was particularly critical of Australian media’s reporting of cables that showed the US government was closely watching the rise of the then deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard.
“Media continues to have a field day with the leaked cables,” the US embassy reported. “A few moderating voices can be heard. Michael Fullilove of the Lowy Institution, Australia’s highest profile think tank, while calling the leaks ‘fascinating’, also termed Wikileaks’ conduct reckless in a blog post.
“But for the most part, sensationalist headlines are drowning out Fullilove and other reasonable observers. For every serious story about Australian involvement in Afghanistan, for example, there are twice as many about the fact that [US government] contacts told us that (to no one’s surprise) Julia Gillard, while deputy prime minister, harbored ambition to be the prime minister.”
The embassy also reported back to Washington that the Australian federal police had concluded the cables revealed no crimes that were in its jurisdiction to investigate.
The document was released to Italian investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi, who waged an eight-year FoI battle with the US state department to obtain it. Maurizi shared the document with Guardian Australia.
The cable is the result of a lengthy, expensive FoI battle by Maurizi, supported by the Logan Foundation and her lawyers, Lauren Russell and Alia Smith. She said it provided “indisputable evidence that the U.S. diplomacy’s Regional Security Office (RSO) in Canberra was monitoring the peaceful protests in support of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in December 2010, as WikiLeaks had just started publishing the most important cables on Australia”.
“We know that the Regional Security Office protects U.S. diplomatic facilities, personnel and information, which is a legitimate activity, at the same time, one wonders what kind of monitoring activities were devised against peaceful protesters: were they identified? Were they intercepted? Were their donations to WikiLeaks tracked?” she said. “These are important questions, considering that we now know that later on, in 2017, Julian Assange, his wife, Stella … the WikiLeaks journalists, lawyers, doctors, and even we media partners were subjected to unprecedented spying activities inside the Ecuadorian embassy.”
The Italian journalist first filed an FoI request in February 2018, but it was ignored for two years, prompting her to sue the US state department.
She has filed similar FoI requests across the world, including in Australia, which she described as “the worst jurisdiction on earth when it comes to FOIA [Freedom of Information Act]”.
Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, said he had always imagined that the US was monitoring pro-Assange activities in Australia. He said that the campaign for Assange’s release relied on that feedback mechanism.
“I think in terms of the message that we want to send to the US, that the Australian public and the Australian people are on Julian’s side, it’s almost good that they’re monitoring and feeding it back into their system,” he said. “Part of the campaign, we rely on that infrastructure that they have through their embassies and state department, around the world, not just in Australia, there are protests in Mexico City, outside the US embassy, even in Slovenia, places all around the world where there are pro-Assange protests.”
Assange’s lawyers are suing the Central Intelligence Agency over the alleged espionage at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, saying it violated their US constitutional protections for confidential discussions with Assange.
The US embassy in Australia was approached for comment.
