The Story Behind the Publication of WikiLeaks’s Afghanistan Logs

You wouldn’t be reading the coverage of the so-called Afghanistan logs—in the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian — if Nick Davies, a senior contributor to the British paper, hadn’t tracked down WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Brussels one month ago. Davies’s interest had been piqued in mid-June when Bradley Manning, a junior army intelligence analyst and the alleged source of several high-profile WikiLeaks disclosures, was quoted in chat transcripts claiming to have leaked a voluminous amount of yet-to-be disclosed diplomatic cables. Whatever Assange had, and whomever its source, Davies knew that WikiLeaks would publish again—and hoped to convince him to let the Guardian look at any future release before WikiLeaks splashed it on its own site.