Benedict Arnold

The WikiLeaks Mole

By David Kushner, Rolling Stone

January 6, 2014 9:00 AM ET

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.

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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.

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Just after 3 a.m. on August 23rd, 2011, the pressure Siggi felt finally broke him. Crawling from bed, he e-mailed the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik and asked for a meeting. It wasn’t just the LulzSec association that concerned him. Assange seemed to have changed from the man he met the year before. While he was unwilling to donate the amount he’d promised to Manning’s defense, he was ready to blow large sums rehabilitating his ailing image. “I don’t care,” Assange told him. “We have a million bucks, and we can spend it on buying publicity.” For Siggi, it was a turning point. “I realized that this wasn’t the same ideology as before,” he says. But truth is, Siggi was also trying to save his own ass. Going to the FBI, he hoped, would inoculate him against prosecution. And, he admits, he thought being a spy for the feds would be a thrill. There was just one price to pay: “I would be betraying WikiLeaks, Julian, my friends,” he says.

The next day, Siggi got called to the U.S. Embassy and was soon taken to a nearby hotel, where he was met by the FBI. They wanted to know WikiLeaks’ physical security, their technical security, locations of computer servers, how Assange lived, his daily routine, “literally, everything,” Siggi says. And he had plenty of data to share: several hard drives of WikiLeaks private files that he had amassed during his time with the organization – just in case he ever needed them.

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But Siggi’s spy work was jeopardized that same month when he got an angry call from WikiLeaks’ spokesman Hrafnsson, accusing him of embezzling $50,000 in proceeds from selling WikiLeaks merchandise online. Siggi insists that he had run the money through his account with Assange’s permission, and that any extra cash went to cover his own expenses. With both sides warring, it isn’t clear whom to believe. But even if Siggi was guilty, the accusations raised more questions about why the boy, whom the group says had no role in the organization, had access to such funds in the first place. Hrafnsson threatened to report him to the police. Siggi e-mailed the FBI telling them the news. “No longer with WikiLeaks – so not sure how I can help you more. Sorry I couldn’t do more :(”

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It didn’t take long for the hammer to fall. On March 5th, LulzSec hacker Jeremy Hammond was arrested for hacking the Stratfor files leaked to WikiLeaks (he’d later be sentenced to 10 years in prison). The next day, Kayla, the LulzSec hacker Siggi had conspired with, was indicted on conspiracy charges – and revealed to be a man, 25-year-old Ryan Ackroyd, from England. But the biggest shock came when Siggi read in the news that Sabu was an FBI informant, and had been since June 2011. It suddenly all made perfect sense. For months, he had been informing the FBI of his conversations with Sabu, and they hadn’t seemed to care. And since Sabu had been an informant during the time of the Stratfor and Syria files, that meant something incredible: The FBI had been well aware of the Stratfor and Syria hacks all along, and done nothing to intervene. Their target had always been Assange. The biggest and most famous hack in recent years was a carefully built plot by the FBI to snare a man it considered as an enemy of the state.

“Ultimately, the FBI’s mission is to apprehend criminals and prevent the commission of serious crimes,” says Glenn Greenwald, the journalist whom Edward Snowden leaked NSA files to last year. “In this particular case, they purposely allowed the commission of serious crimes they could have easily stopped. To treat an American firm like Stratfor and the privacy of Syria as sacrificial lambs in a campaign to entrap Julian Assange into criminality is unbelievably radical – you can even say corrupt.”

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Two months later, Jónasson found out that a plane full of FBI agents had arrived in Iceland for another purpose: to investigate WikiLeaks. Because they didn’t have authorization for this, he turned them away – only to find out later that they had taken Siggi to Copenhagen. “I still have suspicion,” he says, “that this was part of an attempt to put a case against Julian Assange.”

Hrafnsson remains just as outraged, though he tells me he and Assange weren’t shocked. “We have stopped being surprised about anything,” he says. When I ask if Assange feels betrayed by Siggi, Hrafnsson arches his brow. “Inherently in your question is the assumption that there was a very close relationship, which I never saw.”

While Assange remains holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Siggi faces the repercussions of coming clean. Among other things, for the first time in this story, he’s admitting to the Milestone leak. “It’s probably going to lead to my conviction,” he says. “But I just have to face that.” In the meantime, in addition to unrelated fraud charges, he’s appealing his sentence of eight months for sexual misconduct. Siggi claims the victim’s father pressed the charges after learning of Siggi’s relationship with his son; Siggi calls his homosexual tryst a “phase.”

As for WikiLeaks, should he ever get asked one day to testify against Assange, Siggi isn’t sure whether he will comply. He knows that he betrayed his former mentor and friend. But he says he did it all for the very same reasons he believed in WikiLeaks and Assange: “The truth needs to come out.”