Spies, spooks, and Succession: A news leader on ‘the most fraught story’ of his career

When renowned editor Alan Rusbridger was at the helm of The Guardian newspaper in the UK, one of his correspondents in Libya disappeared. War was about to erupt, but Rusbridger had to do something.

“I was in touch with Gadaffi’s son, so I jumped on a plane to Tripoli. I sat in a deserted hotel. There was a piano there. For three or four hours a day, I went down to this ghostly foyer and just played.”

The piano is Rusbridger's stress management tool and it would come in handy not only during this high-stakes negotiation for the release of his reporter, but again on ground-breaking news stories involving spies, spooks, and the secrets a man named Edward Snowden was about to expose.?

I turned up in Alan Rusbridger’s office in London moments after News Corporation’s?Rupert Murdoch announced he’d be stepping back from the top job in his global media empire. We spoke about the Succession-like drama of the Murdoch reign, the fate of Wikileaks whistleblower Julian Assange, and the grit it takes to hold the line when breaking the biggest stories of our generation.

Snowden, spooks, and staying cool under pressure?

It was an unusually warm July in London in 2013 when Alan Rusbridger found himself buying an angle grinder... a rather curious tool for a newspaper editor to need. But this was not a usual time in the history of the newspaper.?

Officials from GCHQ, the UK’s intelligence agency, looked on as Guardian staff pulverised hardware containing secret leaks given to them by whistleblower Edward Snowdon, which exposed mass surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA). There was a lot on the line.

“It was easily the most complicated and fraught story I was involved in, in 20 years. It wasn’t just my editorship, it was my freedom,” he explains.

“We were dealing with official secrecy laws in the US and the UK, and it was clear we were near the edge, if not over the edge of those. It was complex on every possible level. Ethically, legally, morally, technically.”

Despite immense pressure to get this explosive story out quickly – Snowden felt he had hours, not days, to get the secrets out – Rusbridger stuck to a golden rule of journalism: It’s better to be right than first. The Guardian flew a reporter to Hong Kong for a covert meeting with Snowden, who’d fled from the United States. The reporting team dotted the Is and crossed the Ts, even double-checking the correct spelling of Snowden's name.

It was a time of “heightened paranoia”. A secure room was created inside The Guardian’s headquarters in London.

“We bought computers that had never been connected to the internet, printers that had never been connected to the internet. All phones were taken out of the room. In my own office, I unplugged everything, including televisions, fridges,” Rusbridger says.

“At one point, the Cabinet Secretary pointed out through my window to a block of flats across the water. He said, ‘You realise the Chinese will be in there.’ I had a glass of water in front of me. He said, ‘They’ll have a laser on that tumbler and they’ll have turned it into a microphone and they can listen to what we’re saying’.

“Whether that was true or not, well it gave you pause for thought. The curtains came down immediately. And [at home] if I wanted to talk to my wife about it, we went out into the woods, and did all the things spies are supposed to do.”

Not your usual source: Working with Assange

Before Snowden, there was Julian Assange. Rusbridger first met the Australian when he reached out with a scoop about corruption in Kenya, and there were multiple leads from WikiLeaks across the next few years.

Everything changed in 2010 when WikiLeaks themselves released video of a US military attack on Iraqi civilians in Baghdad.

Rusbridger says while people like Snowdon and Chelsea Manning were sources of information, Assange wanted to “be everything”.

“He brought the story in, but he also wanted to be the publisher. He wanted to be the editor. He wants to be the impresario. It’s completely understandable why he did that; partly it was a question of survival. But it also made the target on his back bigger.”

Assange has been imprisoned for years, first in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and since 2019 in jail as he fights extradition to the US. Like the cross-party delegation of Australian politicians currently lobbying for his release, Rusbridger believes enough is enough.

“The main thing that aggravates me is this question of extra territoriality. Julian is an Australian citizen working in London, and it’s claimed he has broken American rules around national security. Turn that around –? imagine it was an American citizen, working as a journalist in London, who had written about India’s nuclear programme. Can you imagine the Americans would ever voluntarily relinquish and hand over a journalist to India because they had broken domestic laws?”

Why leader's need a release valve

Rusbridger ran The Guardian from 1995-2005, and says the extraordinary power of the role never stopped making him nervous.

“What happens on your watch is your responsibility, legally and ethically, financially, technologically. All kinds of things can go wrong and do go wrong,” he says.

So it’s been important for Rusbridger to carve out some time away from his nine-to-nine job.?

“Music was quite an important safety valve. If I could play the piano for 20 minutes a day, it was an important distraction from everything else that was going on.”

It doesn’t have to be a piano in Tripoli (and correspondent Ghaith Abdul-Ahad was released by the Libyan authorities after two weeks in captivity.)

“It almost doesn’t matter what you do, but in these highly stressful jobs, it’s important to wall off a bit of the day and just say, ‘For this 30 minutes I’m going to switch the phone off, you can’t get in touch with me’,” Rusbridger says. And for him it meant taking on the mammoth task of mastering one of Chopin’s most difficult pieces, which he writes about in his book Play It Again.

Succession and the Murdochs

Fittingly, another huge story was breaking as I met with Rusbridger at the London office of Prospect Magazine where he’s now the editor. For Rusbridger, the media baron’s legacy isn’t black and white.

“[Rupert Murdoch is] an extraordinary character. It’s difficult to imagine we will ever see anybody quite like him again. There are pluses. He has been an innovator. He’s had huge commercial successes. He’s been a great defender of journalists,” he says.

“But there have been enormous ethical failings, phone hacking in the UK, the appalling debacle with Fox News knowingly punting lies, which led to the insurrection on January 6 in America.”

Rusbridger says the TV show Succession offers a “completely plausible” insight into the kind of family dynamics that could play out now.

“I should think it’s not going to be Succession, but it’s going to be messy. I would predict the company will be broken up. But who knows?”

Curveball is a production of podcast consultancy Deadset Studios. Curveball’s host Kellie Riordan is the former head of podcasts at the ABC. Alan Rusbridger has a new podcast called Media Confidential.