WikiLeaks (33 page)

Just before close of play, the bail conditions were met. At 5.48pm Assange emerged on to the steps of the high court into the flash-flare of TV cameras and photographers – clutching his bail papers, his right arm raised in triumph. There were whoops and cheers from his supporters. He had been in prison a mere nine days. But the atmosphere was as if he was had made the long walk to freedom, just like Nelson Mandela. Assange addressed the crowd:

It’s great to smell [the] fresh air of London again … First, some thank-yous. To all the people around the world who had faith in me, who have supported my team while I have been away. To my lawyers, who have put up a brave and ultimately successful fight, to our sureties and people who have provided money in the face of great difficulty and aversion. And to members of the press who are not all taken in and considered to look deeper in their work. And, I guess, finally, to the British justice system itself, where if justice is not always the outcome at least it is not dead yet.

During my time in solitary confinement in the bottom of a Victorian prison I had time to reflect on the conditions of those people around the world also in solitary confinement, also on remand, in conditions that are more difficult than those faced by me. Those people need your attention and support. And with that I hope to continue my work and
continue to protest my innocence in this matter and to reveal, as we get it, which we have not yet, the evidence from these allegations. Thank you.

It was a strange little speech, executed in curiously looping phrases and odd syntax. But as a piece of TV theatre it was perfect – with Assange identifying himself with freedom and justice, while expressing a virtuous concern for his fellow man. His lawyers standing to his side – Robertson, Robinson, and Stephens – seemed to be trying to radiate both solemnity and delight. In the long run, the court’s decision was unlikely to change much: Assange had yet to confront his accusers in Sweden; the prospect of extradition to the US loomed like a dark ghost. But for the moment Assange and WikiLeaks were back in business.

He swept out of the court in Smith’s old armour-plated Land Rover, originally driven by him all the way back from Bosnia and more usually parked – sometimes with a flat tyre – outside the Frontline Club. With snow beginning to fall, the Guards officer and the internet subversive set off together on the latest step of their big adventure. For Smith there had previously been the Balkans and Iraq and the mountains of central Afghanistan, where the temperatures fall below freezing at night. This was something new, which also had several ingredients in common with wars and war reporting. There was adrenaline, lots of it. There was a sense of living for the moment. But, above all, there was uncertainty. Nobody quite knew what would happen next.

Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, England
Christmas 2010

“
Julian is a spectacular showman for the youngsters of the internet era who are disgusted with the seniors
”
J
OHN
Y
OUNG, CRYPTOME.ORG
, 15 J
ULY
2010

Sitting in the kitchen of his temporary country home with the
Guardian
’s Ian Katz and Luke Harding, Assange contemplated the uncertain long-term future of WikiLeaks. He was looking better – still somewhat wrung out after his brief ordeal in Wandsworth prison, but cheerful and composed. It was a pleasant English scene: stilton cheese and fruitcake were on the table; two female kitchen workers were chopping up beef for dinner; his host Vaughan Smith’s father was once more protectively prowling the grounds with his rifle and deerstalker hat; and sacks full of Christmas cards and fan mail for Assange were arriving daily for the mantelpiece.

But anxiety was never far away. The previous night, yet another grandstanding commentator on Fox News had called for Assange’s death. “It’s quite dangerous actually. I’m known to be in a particular place at a particular time,” he said, casting a glance out of the window and across the estate. He had been thinking
about how he would handle life in an American jail if they ever sought to extradite him: “I would … have a high chance of being killed in the US prison system, Jack Ruby style, given the continual calls for my murder by senior and influential US politicians.”

Even in his moments of gloom, Assange could not resist painting himself on a canvas of historical importance: in 1963 Jack Ruby shot to death Lee Harvey Oswald, days after Oswald was arrested for the assassination of President John F Kennedy. Many people at the time thought Oswald had to be silenced, because he Knew Too Much.

Assange’s counsel, Geoffrey Robertson, was even more extreme in his predictions. He told one British court: “There is a real risk … of him being detained at Guantánamo Bay … There is a real risk that he could be made the subject of the death penalty.”

By Christmas, there were indeed some reasons to wonder whether the WikiLeaks phenomenon might not be on the way out. Was it a brief comet that had streaked across the sky throughout 2010, thanks to an extraordinarily audacious act by one young soldier, but was now likely to be extinguished? The supposed leaker of the tsunami of documents, Bradley Manning, could only look forward to his court martial in the spring, followed, no doubt, by many grim years in a US brig. Meanwhile, anyone who typed in the URL “wikileaks.org” got a message that the operation was not functioning: “At the moment WikiLeaks is not accepting new submissions.”

There were money uncertainties, too. The Germany-based Wau Holland Foundation, WikiLeaks’ main financial arm, for the first time released some data about revenue from donations at the end of the year. It showed that Assange was trying to put his team on a more regular footing, with salaries for key employees costing €100,000 a year, including €66,000 annually to go to him. Another €380,000 was going on expenses, including hardware and travel. Thanks to the global publicity generated with his
newspaper partnership, WikiLeaks had acquired an impressive €1 million in donations in 2010. But closer analysis showed donations had dropped off significantly in the second half of the year: by August, the site had raised about €765,000, meaning it only collected about €235,000 subsequently.

Assange said the “political interference” by the US, which had led corporations such as Visa and MasterCard to stop donations to WikiLeaks, had dealt his organisation a blow. It was “economic censorship outside the judicial system”. By his estimate, pulling these financial plugs cost WikiLeaks half a million euros in donations – a war chest that could have funded its operations for another six months. Assange added that his own defence fund had been “totally paralysed”. “We don’t have enough money to pay our legal bills,” he said. At this point WikiLeaks’ projected legal costs had risen to
£
200,000, with his own personal legal bill at another
£
200,000. It even cost him
£
16,000 to have the Swedish material in his case translated into English, he claimed.

These legal difficulties over his Swedish sex case were yet another brake on WikiLeaks’ future. The nomadic Assange was grounded. Because of his bail conditions, he was shackled to Ellingham Hall – almost literally so, since he had to wear an electronic tag round his ankle, even in the bath. He hated that, describing it in an interview with
Paris Match
magazine as “emasculating” and a “chastity belt”. He also had to turn out and report in person daily to the local police station. The future held the possibility of a wearying legal fight to avoid extradition to Sweden, and perhaps a long-lasting shadow over his reputation because he was not willing to face his accusers.

With another court hearing scheduled for the new year, Assange was still seething at the bad publicity when he met the two
Guardian
journalists, and smouldering at what he characterised as a plot to bring him down. There had been a leak from the Swedish prosecutor’s report, containing witness statements about his
encounters with both women. The dossier did not support the idea of a “CIA honeytrap”. The
Guardian
’s Nick Davies had published an article in December itemising those details – to Assange’s complaints, and the chagrin of his celebrity supporters.

John Humphrys, the veteran anchorman of BBC Radio 4’s agenda-setting
Today
programme, followed up by demanding to know whether he was a “sexual predator”.

Assange replied: “Of course not.”

Humphrys sought to probe further: “How many women have you slept with?”

Assange, somewhat cornered: “A gentleman doesn’t count!”

He described this encounter with Humphreys as “awful” – it was further proof of his black-and-white insistence that there were only two kinds of journalist out there – the “honest” and the “dishonest”.

Ominously perhaps for the long-term future of Assange’s brainchild, it also looked as though there was a danger WikiLeaks could lose its cyber-leaking monopoly, thanks to the emergence of a crowd of imitators. Over in Germany, in December 2010, the former WikiLeaks No 2 Daniel Domscheit-Berg unveiled OpenLeaks, a rival platform. Domscheit-Berg had fallen out with Assange, accusing him of imperious behaviour. Assange’s personal control of the organisation had additionally created technical “bottlenecks”, he argued, with data not properly analysed or released. At a presentation in Berlin in December, Domscheit-Berg promised OpenLeaks would be more transparent and democratic.

He offered to work systematically alongside mainstream media, with a relatively modest and logical goal for his own “transparency organisation”. He said that OpenLeaks.org could confine its technical activities to “cleaning” leaks so that they could be submitted safely and anonymously online. That specialised task performed, the leaks would be turned over to newspapers and
broadcasters, who would then do what the traditional media was good at, bringing resources, analysis and context. Finally, there was publication. Domscheit-Berg argued it was realistic that the mainstream media should generally be allowed to publish leaked material first, in return for the time and effort spent in editing it.

The breakaway organisation was described by one technology website as “hoping to do what WikiLeaks is trying to do but without the drama”. If Domscheit-Berg, or indeed other imitators, could develop workable clones of WikiLeaks, then there was little doubt that many other mainstream editors would be attracted to them.

Meanwhile, for all its high profile, WikiLeaks lacked a coherent organisation. One of his most stalwart helpers, Kristinn Hrafnsson, went back to Iceland for Christmas. Team Assange was only slowly moving from its origins as a rather chaotic insurgency towards a more structured organisation. Beseeched by his friends to enlist professional aides, Assange invited London PR professional Mark Borkowski to prepare him a public relations plan. After a day spent at Ellingham Hall, however, the elaborate Borkowski deal failed to materialise. Assange compromised by attempting to get in his own spokesmen to deal with the torrent of media demands. In January he advertised for some novel vacancies: “Four graduates wanted to staff newly established WikiLeaks press office. Appropriate remuneration. Successful candidates will be disciplined, articulate, quick-witted, capable of multi-tasking and accustomed to lack of sleep. Ability to start immediately is essential.”

Assange thus faced a formidable list of challenges as he sat around the Christmas Day lunch table with Vaughan Smith and his family – though you might not have guessed it from his decision to sport a Santa suit and play up to the camera lens for a gossipy
Newsweek
photo-shoot. But the man who had caused such a worldwide commotion had not lost his strengths.

He promptly succeeded in obtaining a contract to write his memoirs for more than a million pounds ($1.6m). This deal, brokered by literary agent Caroline Michel with Knopf in the US and Canongate in the UK, plus several foreign publishers, assuaged some of his money worries. “I don’t want to write this book but I have to,” he explained. He was liable to get more than
£
250,000 immediately in advances, although a six-figure chunk would have to be set aside to hire a ghostwriter. Michel’s agency also set up a meeting with Paul Greengrass, acclaimed director of
The Bourne Ultimatum
, with a view to him turning Assange’s life-story into a secret-agent escapade. The book,
WikiLeaks Versus the World: My Story
, was scheduled for release in April 2011 – an ambitious deadline.

Another piece of good news was the diminishing prospect that Assange would personally become the victim of some kind of vengeful US drone-strike. The US department of justice had issued secret subpoenas on 14 December for the Twitter accounts of Manning, Assange and his friends. This led to unwelcome publicity when Twitter robustly went to court and got the subpoena unsealed. Icelandic MP and WikiLeaks supporter Birgitta Jónsdóttir made a political fuss. “It sort of feels to me as if they’ve become quite desperate,” Jónsdóttir said. The investigation was fruitless, she added, since “none of us would ever use Twitter messaging to say anything sensitive”. If the US was reduced to chasing tweets, their legal pursuit appeared to have become slightly less menacing.

Contrary to the bloodcurdling claims made in public about the crimes of WikiLeaks, senior state department officials in fact appeared to have concluded by mid-January that the WikiLeaks controversy had caused little real and lasting damage to American diplomacy. The Reuters news agency reported on 19 January 2011 that in private briefings to Congress top US diplomats admitted the fall-out from the release of thousands of private
diplomatic cables across the globe had not been especially bad. One congressional official briefed on the reviews told Reuters that the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers. “I think they want to present the toughest front they can muster,” the officials said.