Bill Condon's ‘The Fifth Estate’

Being no admirer of Julian Assange, I didn't rush to see Bill Condon's The Fifth Estate when it first came out but recently took the opportunity to do so at the Barn Cinema at Dartington. The film is a docudrama about the emergence of WikiLeaks from the time of Assange's partnering with the German IT expert Daniel Berg in 2007 up to the release of classified US information sourced from Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning in 2010 and their association ending. Assange's seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 forms a postscript.

The film must have had a substantial budget because of the large cast, the number of extras, the CGI and the rapid changes of locale. No location seemed to be used more than twice, usually once, and the numerous sets ranged from Berlin squats to Air Force One (or maybe Two or Three), the action not staying in any of them for long. Benedict Cumberbatch turned in a convincing Assange, and, although the film is a male-dominated nerd and journo fest, it provided a couple of strong supporting roles for Alicia Vikander (Queen Caroline in Nikolaj Arcel's A Royal Affair) as Berg’s long-suffering girlfriend and Laura Linney as a senior level State Department staffer having to pick up the pieces after the Manning disclosures. Peter Capaldi, who is irrevocably the foul-mouthed spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker, from The Thick of It for UK TV audiences (the ones who will see this film anyway) until he becomes Dr Who, is cast as Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian.

Unfortunately, in terms of allowing comparisons to be made, the real Rusbridger has been on UK TV recently defending his paper's role in handling the material removed from NSA by Edward Snowden. Snowden and the journalist Glen Greenwald have followed the model Assange pioneered with the initial release of the Manning material by cooperating with mainstream media outlets in the form of the Washington Post (vice the New York Times), the Guardian and Der Spiegel.

Snowden and Co have put material into the public domain of much higher classification than Manning was able to access. The US designation for this stuff is TS/SCI - Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information. Years ago such items might be confined to just a few documents, knowledge of whose existence, let alone accessibility, would be confined to select individuals. But now that kind of data is held on globalised IT systems and system administrators set access permissions for individual users. However, an old question arises: who administers the administrators?

When I last wrote about Snowden, on the basis of the information which had been released at that time (July), I affected what now seems too blasé a view. Earlier this month the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament (ISC) took evidence from Sir Iain Lobban, Director, Government Communication Headquarters, Mr Andrew Parker, Director General, Security Service and Sir John Sawers, Chief, Secret Intelligence Service. (Interestingly the second and third of these men had studied science at university level, but not the first, whose responsibilities, one imagines, are the most technological). A transcript of their uncorrected evidence is available, and the impact of the Snowden release is discussed on pages 16 to 18. Sawers mentions Snowden specifically:

… What I can tell you is that the leaks from Snowden have been very damaging. They have put our operations at risk. It is clear that our adversaries are rubbing their hands with glee. Al-Qaeda is lapping it up ... and our own security has suffered as a consequence.

Further material appearing in Der Spiegel later in the month underlines his point.

In October, one of Lobban’s predecessors, Sir David Omand, had told The Times that the Snowden leaks “eclipse[s] the Cambridge spy ring as the most catastrophic loss suffered by British intelligence”.

“You have to distinguish between the original whistleblowing intent to get a debate going, which is a responsible thing to do, and the stealing of 58,000 top-secret British security documents and who knows how many American documents which is seriously, seriously damaging,” Sir David said. “The assumption the experts are working on is that all that information or almost all of it will now be in the hands of Moscow and Beijing. It’s the most catastrophic loss to British intelligence ever, much worse than Burgess and MacLean in the 1950s.”

Omand chose two names from what are often referred to as the Cambridge Five and didn’t mention Kim Philby, although it was these three who finished up as Russian house guests. Whether there was a Fifth Man, and who he was, has been the subject of speculation, the most-fingered suspect being John Cairncross. If so, he was in some ways the most Snowden-like having worked at Bletchley Park during World War 2. But in those days, although primitive computers were in use they certainly weren’t networked, and the only media he could remove was paperwork taken from only one “compartment”, in the form of one of the famous Bletchley Huts.

And who was the Fourth Man? Sir Anthony Blunt made his confession in 1964 in exchange for immunity from prosecution, though the truth (or some of it) would emerge in public in 1979. The Security Service interrogated Blunt because in 1963 an American, Michael Whitney Straight, had told the FBI that he had been a recruiter for Soviet intelligence at Cambridge in the 1930s. Straight was the son of Willard Straight and Dorothy Payne Whitney. Willard died in the Spanish flu epidemic after World War 1. Dorothy remarried and with her second husband, Leonard Elmhirst, came to SW England and in 1925 purchased Dartington Hall in Devon (SW England) where Michael Straight would finish his schooling. Which means this post ends geographically back where it started.


UPDATE 4 DECEMBER 

“The film must have had a substantial budget because of the large cast, the number of extras, the CGI and the rapid changes of locale.” 

But nonetheless it seems to have been the biggest cinematic turkey of 2013, according to Forbes’ Dorothy Pomerantz. The Fifth Estate has earned only $6 million at the box office globally on its $28 million budget, on top of which there will have been marketing costs of as much as $25 million. On average studios receive about 50% of the box office takings, so Dreamworks would be about $25 million down.

Wikileaks and recent posts

A Wikileaks report in the Daily Telegraph last week has linked two of my recent posts. One of these was about the Iraq Inquiry and the other, posted a week earlier, was about a public falling out between the former head of the British Army, Lord Dannatt, and the former UK ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles. The Iraq Inquiry Secretariat has been headed since its formation in 2009 by a career civil servant, Margaret Aldred. Previously she had been deputy head of the foreign and defence policy secretariat at the Cabinet Office and it was in that role that she met with the ‘Political Minister Counselor’ at the US Embassy in London on Wednesday 15 July 2009. The cable sent from the Embassy the following day which summarised their meeting was the basis of the Daily Telegraph Wikileaks report headed:

Lord Dannatt wrong on troop numbers, civil servant told US

The senior civil servant organising the Iraq Inquiry secretly briefed against Britain’s top general after he called for more troops to counter a surge of deaths in Afghanistan.

Going back to an article by Rosa Prince in the Daily Telegraph on 16 July 2009 helps shed light on the atmosphere at the time of the meeting and the subsequent cable from the Embassy:

Richard Dannatt: Boots on ground key to victory in Afghanistan

The head of the Army has added to the pressure on the Government to send additional troops to Afghanistan by saying "more boots on the ground" were vital for victory.

Following heavy British losses in Helmand Province, General Sir Richard Dannatt said that he would like to see "more energy" putting into speeding up the provision of equipment to UK troops.
He said: "I have said before, we can have effect where we have boots on the ground. I don't mind whether the feet in those boots are British, American or Afghan, but we need more to have the persistent effect to give the people confidence in us. That is the top line and the bottom line."
The General was speaking during his last visit to Afghanistan before retiring later this month, as Gordon Brown insisted that "everything we can" was being done by the Government to provide British soldiers with the equipment they needed.
The war in Afghanistan dominated Prime Minister's Question Time yesterday, with David Cameron saying that the number of British helicopters in Afghanistan was "simply insufficient".
Gen Dannatt appeared to back the Tory leader's warning, adding: "We are trying to broaden and deepen our effect here, which is about people and about equipment, and of course to an extent it is about helicopters as well.

It looks as though the purpose of the meeting at the Embassy the day before this appeared was to reassure the US “that HMG remains committed at the highest levels to maintaining its mission in Afghanistan.” The cable states:

[Aldred] stressed that HMG has "worked hard to get the right number of helicopters" ... Referring to General Dannatt's call for more troops, she stated that the PM decided how many British troops would deploy to Afghanistan only after close consultation with the MOD.
Aldred strongly criticized partisan ‘party politicking’ which, she asserted, attempted to capitalize on 15 British combat deaths over a recent 10 day period to cast doubt on HMG’s prosecution of the war effort. "Both opposition parties are seizing every opportunity to attack the government," Aldred said.

Many of the comments put on the Telegraph website about their more recent article brought Andrew Marr’s comment on bloggers to mind – “the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night” etc. Margaret Aldred’s role as a top official was to support the policies of the government of the day, but the tone of the article, and many of the rather personal criticisms attached in the comments, failed to recognise this. Dannatt presumably saw his role at the time as supporting the British army, rather than the UK forces as a whole or the government. We now know that Dannatt and Number 10 had been at odds in late 2006 according to Jonathan Powell, and about Cowper-Coles’ version of his conversation with Dannatt in mid-2007 (earlier post). Then the goings on seemed to provide some sardonic amusement to a mere nonentity like me, albeit tinged with kleinburgerlich schadenfreude. However on this occasion that wouldn’t seem to be appropriate, and one’s sympathies have to be with the Madam Top Kneddy.

Watching BBC1’s Panorama programme on 14 February, Wikileaks: The Secret Story, and its depiction of Julian Assange, should increase anyone’s misgivings about Wikileaks. Listening to some of his former associates, the expression attributed to Lenin, ‘useful idiots’, came to mind. While it seems unlikely that the Wikileaks cables initiated the unrest which is spreading through the Middle East, we may well not yet appreciate all the damage that Assange’s activities can cause. The whole underlying principle seems dubious. A bank clerk who steals his employer’s money, even if to give to worthy causes, is a thief and goes to prison. Is that different from an employee who takes his employer’s confidential information and makes it accessible to the world, purportedly in the public interest? Wikileak’s first associate in the UK media was the Guardian. Assange, having fallen out with them, is now working with the Daily Telegraph, who ran the MP’s expenses revelations of 2009.