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16 July 2013updated 14 Sep 2021 3:33pm

We Steal Secrets rightly restores Bradley Manning to the centre of the WikiLeaks story

Alex Gibney's WikiLeaks documentary rightly celebrates Bradley Manning, while at the same time providing plenty of ammo for Julian Assange's many critics.

By Ryan Gilbey

We Steal Secrets: the Story of WikiLeaks (15)
dir: Alex Gibney

Until a few years ago, the description of a public figure as a “crazy, white-haired Aussie dude” would likely have called to mind Sir Les Patterson, the sozzled Australian cultural attaché created by Barry Humphries. In We Steal Secrets: the Story of WikiLeaks, the silver-maned nut job we are presented with is Julian Assange. Whether his personal conduct towards women gives him something else in common with Sir Les is one of several questions that Alex Gibney can only raise without any hope of answering conclusively.

It’s regrettable that Assange didn’t consent to an interview – or, at least, to one that wasn’t accompanied by a $1m price tag. On the whole, Gibney (who directed Enron and Taxi to the Dark Side, about the murder of an Afghan cab driver by US soldiers) has made the best of what he’s got. Most importantly, the picture restores to the centre of the narrative Private Bradley Manning, a genuine hero not at liberty to take advantage of the hospitality of the Ecuadorian embassy.

Gibney traces Assange’s subversiveness back to his involvement in the Wank Worm, which sounds like a subject for a post-watershed edition of Gardeners’ Question Time but is actually a virus (“Worms Against Nuclear Killers”) used by Australian hackers to destabilise Nasa computer systems in the late 1980s. For the film’s first hour, Assange is presented as quite the folk hero. He set up WikiLeaks as a confidential drop box for secrets requiring urgent disclosure; an early success for the site was its revelation about suspicious practices at Icelandic banks, which prompted riots by a people not renowned for their fury, Björk aside.

Entering the story stage left, burdened with secrets personal and governmental, is Manning, a guilt-ridden innocent who resembles a smudge of Angel Delight with acne. Among the classified videos he passes anonymously to WikiLeaks is one of a US air strike on Baghdad by whooping, adrenalised soldiers who appear to be under the impression that they’re playing Call of Duty. Eleven people died in that sustained attack, including a father driving his children to school and two members of Reuters staff whose cameras were mistaken for weapons.

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While the reach of Assange and WikiLeaks is represented in the film by images of lines latticing the globe, Manning’s words are rendered entirely in a lonely ticker tape of computer type, the cursor blinking plaintively at the end of each line. (His username, bradass87, is touchingly aspirational in the special way that only usernames can be.) Asked by Adrian Lamo, the hacker to whom he reaches out and who ends up shopping him to the authorities, why he has turned whistle-blower, Manning types: “I . . . care?”

We Steal Secrets is correct to celebrate Manning. But it’s obvious from the roll call of interviewees, which includes a number of people who believe they’ve been wronged by Assange (such as his former partner-in-espionage Daniel Domscheit-Berg), that any bias will not be favourable to the WikiLeaks founder. Admittedly, he doesn’t help matters. From colossal errors (refusing to confront fully the allegations that he sexually assaulted two women) to trifling ones (there’s some unflattering footage of him bullishly contradicting Domscheit-Berg in public or disingenuously expressing a discomfort with being photographed), he has supplied much of the ammo for his character assassins.

What the film doesn’t convey is the possibility that only someone of Assange’s personality type could have engineered something as revolutionary as WikiLeaks (even if his approach to life-saving redactions in classified documents could be cavalier). Just as Assange’s misjudgements threaten to sully the good name of WikiLeaks, so it only takes a few indulgent flourishes by Gibney to shake our faith in his methods. A superfluous interlude reconstructing a night in the life of James Ball, a former WikiLeaks employee, suggests that Gibney harbours ambitions to make moody pop promos for Radiohead. And it can only weaken the movie’s charges against Assange to play in slow motion footage of him boogieing appallingly at a party. Impugn his integrity by all means. Savage his character. But don’t show the world his white man’s overbite and his dad-like dance moves.

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