Just like in the movie, we had to work our way

[[email protected]]

up, talking to each bureaucrat more senior than the next, until we were finally connected to Mrs. Clinton's senior legal adviser. He told us he would call us back. We hung up and waited.

Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in the UK
Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in the UK
***
When the phone rang half an hour later, it wasn’t the State Department on the other end of the line. It was Joseph Farrell, the American WikiLeaks employee who had set up our recent meeting with Google. He had just received an email from Lisa Shields asking him to confirm whether the State Department had indeed been called by WikiLeaks.

At that point, I finally realized that Eric Schmidt wasn’t the only list of lebanon cell phone numbers infiltrator at Google. Officially or not, he had a network that kept him close to Washington, including a well-documented relationship with President Obama. Not only did Hillary Clinton’s people know that Shields, along with other Schmidt associates, had visited me, they had also chosen her to be their backup channel.

While WikiLeaks was deeply involved in publishing the internal archives of the US State Department, the US State Department snuck into the WikiLeaks command center and squeezed a free lunch out of me. Two years later, in 2013, when the visits to China, North Korea and Burma began, Eric Schmidt really became valuable as Washington’s “behind-the-scenes diplomat.” But at the time, this was something new.

I returned to this in February 2012, when WikiLeaks—along with some thirty media partners—began publishing the Global Intelligence Report: internal communications from the Texas-based private intelligence agency Stratfor.