Siggi Thordarson with Julian Assange in London 2011.
Allen Clark
January 6, 2014 9:00 AM ET
On
a recent frigid night near Reykjavik, Iceland, Sigurdur "Siggi"
Thordarson slips into a bubbling geothermal pool at a suburban swim
club. The cherubic, blond 21-year-old, who has been called everything in
the press from "attention seeker" to "traitor" to "psychopath," ends
many of his days here, where, like most places around the city, he's
notorious. But even at a spa, he can find only the briefest moment of
relaxation. Soon, the local prosecutor who is trying him for leaking
financial records joins him in the tub, and Siggi quickly has to flee to
another pool. "How does it feel to be the most dangerous man in
Iceland?" a bather shouts across the steam.
Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview
In person, Siggi's doughy shape and boyish smile make him seem less
than menacing – unless you're another one of the world's most dangerous
men, Julian Assange. Four years ago, just as WikiLeaks was winning
international notoriety, the then-17-year-old hacking prodigy became
Assange's youngest and most trusted sidekick. "It was like Batman and
Robin," says Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a former WikiLeaks volunteer and
member of the Icelandic parliament. But as Assange became more embattled
and besieged, the protégé turned on his mentor in the most shocking of
ways: becoming the first FBI informant inside the group.
Siggi's story of international espionage and teenage high-roller antics plays like James Bond meets
Superbad,
starring a confounding mash-up of awkward man-child and balls-out tech
savant. And his tale reveals not only the paranoia and strife within
WikiLeaks, but just how far the feds were willing to go to get Assange.
Siggi still lives with his parents in a nondescript high-rise,
sitting at his computer in a bedroom lined with stuffed animals,
including an orangutan-size Garfield he bought for $2,000. But his
jet-black Mercedes ML350 is parked outside, which, along with his recent
conviction for sexual misconduct against a 17-year-old boy (he says the
relationship was consensual), speaks to his bizarre double life.
The Trials of Bradley Manning
The revelation of Siggi's role as an FBI snitch has polarized
WikiLeaks insiders. When I met with WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn
Hrafnsson (Assange declined to talk for this story), he grew red in the
face, dismissing Siggi as "a pathological liar," a party line echoed by
the WikiLeaks faithful. "It all sounds rather absurd," Hrafnsson says,
"to go and to spend all this time analyzing the absolute bullshit that
is flowing out of this young man, who is so troubled that he should be
hospitalized."
While other WikiLeaks insiders also question Siggi's credibility,
they insist that his story can't be discounted, and there's more to it
than the organization is letting on. Tangerine Bolen, founder of the
whistle-blowing advocacy organization RevolutionTruth, which used to
work closely with WikiLeaks, is among those who say the group's efforts
to discredit Siggi are "patently false. They're scared. The fact is
Siggi played a key role in the organization and was very close to
Julian."
The truth, it seems, may be held in the leaks. Siggi has provided
Rolling Stone
with more than a terabyte of secret files he claims to have taken from
WikiLeaks before he left in November 2011 and gave to the FBI: thousands
of pages of chat logs, videos, tapped phone calls, government documents
and more than a few bombshells from the organization's most heated
years. They're either the real thing, or the most elaborate lie of the
digital age.
Jacob Applebaum: The American WikiLeaks Hacker
Assange himself validated the importance of Siggi's documents when he
filed an affidavit late this past summer asserting that "the FBI
illegally acquired stolen organisational and personal data belonging to
WikiLeaks, me and other third parties in Denmark in March 2012" and that
the FBI "was attempting to entrap me through Sigurdur Thordarson."
Whatever their origins, the SiggiLeaks are a deep and revealing
portal into one of the most guarded and influential organizations of the
21st century – and the extreme measures its embattled leader is willing
to take. Of all Assange's allies who've come and gone, few served him
as faithfully as Siggi, or betrayed him so utterly. "One thing is sure,"
Siggi tells me in his thick Icelandic accent, as the vapors from the
thermal pool rise around him. "I have not lived a life like a teenager."
Like
Assange and so many gifted hackers, Siggi had an isolated childhood.
The son of a hairdresser and a paint-company sales manager, he grew up
with his little sister in a middleclass suburb of Reykjavik. Though
puckish and bright, he was bored by school, alienated from his
classmates and dreamed of a life beyond bourgeois Nordic comfort. "When I
was, like, 12 years old, I wished for a couple of things," he tells me
as we drive one afternoon past some lava fields outside the capital. "I
wished to be rich; I wished to be a famous guy; I wished to live an
adventureful life."
He found the excitement he craved in computers, and at age 12 he says
he hacked into his first website, a local union's home page, which he
replaced with a picture of "a big fluffy monkey." The experience
empowered him. "When you do something like that, you feel invincible,"
he says, "and if you can do that, what else can you do?"
He found out two years later, when, on a plane back from a family
vacation, he fixed a laptop for a businessman sitting next to him. The
executive was so impressed by his skills that he offered him a job at
the Icelandic financial firm Milestone: scrubbing computers of sensitive
documents. Siggi figures the company trusted him with such data because
he was only 14 and must have thought, as he says, "I wouldn't
understand what I was supposed to delete." Plus, the pay dwarfed that of
his paper route.
WikiLeaks' Greatest Hits
Curious about the files he was erasing, he'd copy them and study them
at night. What he eventually discovered astonished him: Employees of
Milestone seemed guilty of large-scale corruption in collusion with
local politicians. At this time, in 2009, Iceland was reeling from the
worldwide financial crisis, and Siggi believed the people deserved to
know the role of Milestone and their dirty politicians – even if that
meant leaking the files. "Someone has to do it," he thought, "and why
not me?"
In the fall, Siggi says he brought more than 600 gigabytes of Milestone data to the Icelandic newspaper
Dagbladid Vísir,
making front-page news and leading to investigations against the
politicians and businessmen he exposed. Siggi believed in the importance
of exposing the corruption he describes as "illegal as it gets." With
his identity still secret, he kept on leaking to other media outlets
until, for reasons he never learned, his childhood friend outed him, a
betrayal that changed him. "I literally just stopped believing in
humanity," he says. "Since then, I just basically stopped having
feelings."
But after being arrested and splashed across the news, he found a
powerful connection in Kristinn Hrafnsson. A well-known TV reporter in
Reykjavik at the time, Hrafnsson considered Siggi's leaks to be "quite
significant" and worthy of an introduction to another up-and-coming
whistle-blower, Julian Assange, who was speaking at the University of
Iceland. Though WikiLeaks had already exposed death squads in Kenya and
financial malfeasance in the Swiss bank Julius Baer, the group was still
largely unknown. But at the panel, Siggi found, to his surprise, that
Assange was well aware of his work – he even chastised the reporter who
revealed Siggi's name in the Milestone leak. "He was basically just
condemning the guy, sayingouting whistleblowers is wrong," recalls
Siggi, who reveled in the support.
The bond between the two was immediate. Assange too had been arrested
for hacking when he was a young man in Australia. He also had a son,
Daniel, who was roughly Siggi's age, whom he had little contact. "I
think Julian saw himself in Siggi," says Jónsdóttir. "Julian felt an
immediate sympathy toward the kid."
After the panel, Siggi says he took Assange to Sea Bar, a small,
rustic restaurant on the water. Over lobster soup and whale steak, they
spoke about politics, hacking and their shared sense of purpose in
exposing the secrets of the elite. Assange struck Siggi as someone with
the courage to take on anyone. "He's the kind of activist that does the
thing that has to be done," Siggi tells me. After talking for a few
hours, Assange took out a small metal box. "Have you ever seen this
before?" he said.
Assange cracked open the container and revealed three phones inside.
"These are encrypted cellphones," he said. "I'm going to give you one.
Just keep it on at all times so I can communicate with you, day and
night."
Read More Here
