WikiLeaks (6 page)

The unusual Australian who wrote up his dating profile for the OKCupid website used the name ‘Harry Harrison’. He was 36 years old, 6ft 2ins tall and, said the site’s test, “87% slut.” He began:

“WARNING: Want a regular, down to earth guy? Keep moving. I am not the droid you are looking for. Save us both while you still can. Passionate, and often pig headed activist intellectual seeks siren for love affair, children and occasional criminal conspiracy. Such a woman should be spirited and playful, of high intelligence, though not necessarily formally educated, have spunk, class & inner strength and be able to think strategically about the world and the people she cares about.

“I like women from countries that have sustained political turmoil. Western culture seems to forge women that are valueless and inane. OK. Not only women!

“Although I am pretty intellectually and physically pugnacious I am very protective of women and children.

“I am DANGER, ACHTUNG, and ??????????????!”

“Harry” went on to say he was directing a “consuming, dangerous, human rights project which is, as you might expect, male dominated”. He also suffered from “Asian teengirl stalkers”. The question what “could [he] never do without” produced the answer, “I could adapt to anything except the loss of female company and carbon.” The profile warned: “Do not write to me if you are timid. I am too busy. Write to me if you are brave.”

Harry’s stated activities were extraordinary. He described himself as “variously professionally involved in international journalism/books, documentaries, cryptography, intelligence activities, civil rights, political activism, white collar crime and the internet”. His gallery of photographs showed a man with pale skin, sharp features and wind-blown silver-grey hair. In some he has a half-smile, in others he stares down the barrel of the camera.

Harry Harrison was a pseudonym, and the person behind the mask was Julian Assange, a computer hacker living in a crowded student house in Melbourne, dreaming up a scheme for an idealistic information insurgency which was eventually to become celebrated – and execrated – worldwide as WikiLeaks. Assange had a striking and, some critics would say, damaged personality. It was on peacock display in this dating profile, but probably rooted deep in his Australian childhood and youth.

His obsession with computers, and his compulsion to keep moving, both seemed to have origins in his restless early years. So too, perhaps, did the rumblings from others that Assange was somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Assange would himself joke, when asked if he was autistic: “Aren’t all men?” His dry sense of humour made him attractive – perhaps too attractive – to women. And there was his high analytical intelligence. In a different incarnation,
Assange could perhaps have been the successful chief executive of a major corporation.

There were a few demerits OKCupid couldn’t capture. Assange’s social skills sometimes seemed lacking. The way his eyes flickered around the room was curious; one
Guardian
journalist described it as “toggling”. And occasionally he forgot to wash. Collaborators who fell out with him – there was to be a long list – accused him of imperiousness and a callous disregard for those of whom he disapproved. Certainly, when crossed, Assange could get very angry indeed, his mood changing as if a switch had been flicked. But in one way the OKCupid profile, last modified in 2006, proved in the end to be dizzyingly accurate. Four years later, in 2010, nobody would be left in any doubt that Assange really did mean, DANGER, ACHTUNG!

Julian was born on 3 July 1971 in Townsville, in the state of Queensland, in Australia’s sub-tropical north. His mother Christine was the daughter of Warren Hawkins, described by colleagues as a rigid and traditionalist academic who became a college principal; the family settled in Australia from 19th-century Scotland. Julian’s biological father is absent from much of the record: at 17, Christine abruptly left home, selling her paintings to buy a motorcycle, a tent and a map. Some 1,500 miles later she arrived in Sydney and joined its counter-culture scene. According to the book
Underground
, a revealing docu-novel to which Assange contributed, his mother worked as an artist and fell in love with a rebellious young man she met at an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in 1970. He fathered Julian. But the relationship ended and he would apparently play no further role in Assange’s life for many years. They had no contact until after Assange turned 25.

His father was not forgotten, though. In 2006, at the start of Julian’s remarkable mission to uncover secrets, he registered the wikileaks.org domain name under what is, according to court
records, his biological father’s identity – John Shipton. After the birth of her child, Christine moved as a single mother to Magnetic Island, a short ferry ride across the bay from Townsville. Magnetic Island was primitive and bohemian. Its small population included hippies who slept on beaches and in rock caves. The local kids would fish, swim, and play cricket with coconuts. There were koalas, possums, and giant clams. The Great Barrier Reef was nearby, and the islanders were eco-pioneers who grew their own vegetables and helped themselves to what was in the sea – fish, prawns, crabs and crayfish.

Assange’s mother later recalled, “I rented an island cottage for $12 a week in Picnic Bay … I lived in a bikini, ‘going native’ with my baby and other mums on the island.” She married Brett Assange, an actor and theatre director. The surname apparently derives from Ah Sang, supposedly a 19th-century Chinese settler. Their touring lifestyle was the backdrop to Assange’s early years. His stepfather staged and directed plays, according to
Underground
, and his mother did the make-up, costumes and set design. She was also a puppeteer.

In 2010, Assange described his stepfather’s productions as good preparation for WikiLeaks, a mobile organisation that could be rolled out or packed up in a matter of hours – “something that my family did do when they were involved in the theatre and movie business which is go to locations, set it up, bring all your people, get it all together, get ready for the production launch and – bang – you go.”

The adult Assange became a shape-shifter: frequently changing hairstyles, and dressing up in other people’s clothes. One day he was an English country gentleman; the next an Icelandic fisherman; or an old woman. Even his role at WikiLeaks seemed unclear. Was he a leaker, a publisher, a journalist, or an activist? When the show was over he would move on.

The Assanges lived for some of the time in an abandoned pineapple farm on Horseshoe Bay. Christine recalled slashing her
way to the front door with a machete. She also claimed to have shot a taipan – a deadly snake – in the water tank. Royce Dalliston, who still lives on Magnetic Island, recalls Christine used to swim and paint under the banyan trees. The other boys would steal waste cooking fat from hotels, and smear it on the roof of the jetty’s sheds to go sliding into the bubbling swell whenever the ferry pulled in from Townsville. Dalliston and the bigger boys called Assange a “raspberry” because the “scrawny little blond-haired kid” seemed too scared to go jetty jumping. But Assange told the
New Yorker
profile writer Raffi Khatchadourian: “I had my own horse. I built my own raft. I went fishing. I was going down mine shafts and tunnels.”

By 1979 Christine was again living close to her parents in Lismore, in New South Wales, where local farmers and the hippies co-existed in a state of mutual incomprehension. Nimbin – the scene of the Age of Aquarius, a 1973 hippy music festival – was just up the road. She had a long swirly skirt and drove a green Volkswagen Beetle. Local hippies successfully stopped the logging of one of the area’s surviving virgin rainforests at Terania. It was the first victory for Australia’s nascent eco-movement. Old footage from the march shows a young woman wearing dungarees trudging along a track, together with a group of bearded activists and guitar-strummers. She looks remarkably like Assange’s mother.

Christine did not want her son to have a conventional Lismore schooling. Lismore was a traditional place, with women banned in the local club from leaving the carpet area, apart from on dance nights. Jennifer Somerville, whose children went to a small rural primary with Assange, recalls: “She was a little bit alternative, and she didn’t believe in terribly formal education. She apparently decided that it would be best if Julian went to a little country school.”

His two-year stint there was one of his most sustained periods of education; according to his own account, during his childhood
he attended 37 different schools, emerging with no qualifications whatsoever. “Some people are really horrified and say: ‘You poor thing, you went to all these schools.’ But actually during this period I really liked it,” Assange later said. Classmates at the school in the hamlet of Goolmangar remember a quiet but sociable boy. His exceptional intelligence and blond, shoulder-length hair marked him out.

One former classmate, Nigel Somerville, says there were “always puppets hanging out of his window … His mum was very artistic. I had a kite she’d made for many years. It was very colourful and had big eyes on it with oranges and reds and blues.” He and Julian would talk about crystal radios and experiment by pulling things apart. Amid the laid-back anti-establishment times, there were paranoid moments. In Adelaide, when Assange was four, his mother’s car had been menacingly pulled over, having left a meeting of anti-nuclear protesters. The police officer told her: “You have a child out at two in the morning. I think you should get out of politics, lady.”

Christine’s marriage was now also running into problems. Brett Assange, who ran the puppet theatre with her, was a good and close stepfather. Assange would in later life often quote sayings “from my father” such as, “Capable, generous men do not create victims: they nurture them.” Brett Assange would later describe his stepson as “a very sharp kid” with a “keen sense of right and wrong”. But according to transcripts of a court hearing Brett was, at the time, “plagued with difficulties with alcohol”. When Assange was seven or eight, his stepfather was removed from his life, when he and Christine divorced.

Assange’s mother then became tempestuously involved with a third, much younger man, Keith Hamilton. Hamilton was an amateur musician and a member of a New Age group, the Santiniketan Park Association. He was also, according to Assange, a manipulative psychopath. Hamilton allegedly had five different
identities. “His whole background was a fabrication, right down to the country of his birth,” Assange claimed in
Underground
. Despite its respectable-sounding name, The Santiniketan Park Association was a notorious cult presided over by Anne Hamilton-Byrne, a yoga teacher who convinced her middle-class followers she was a reincarnation of Jesus. Keith Hamilton was not only associated with the cult. He may even have been Hamilton-Byrne’s son. Hamilton-Byrne and her helpers collected children, often persuading teenage mothers to hand over their babies. She and her disciples – “the aunties” – lived together in an isolated rural property surrounded by a barbed wire fence and overlooking a lake near the town of Eildon, Victoria. Here, they administered a bizarre regime over their charges, who at one point numbered 28 children. There were regular beatings. Children had their heads held down in buckets of water.

Assange’s mother tried to leave Keith Hamilton in 1982, a court transcript reports, resulting in a custody battle for Assange’s half-brother, Jamie. Hamilton was an abusive partner who “had been physically violent”, court documents allege. Assange says Hamilton now pursued his mother, forcing her to flee repeatedly with her children. Assange told an Australian journalist in 2010: “My mother had become involved with a person who seems to be the son of Anne Hamilton-Byrne, of the Anne Hamilton-Byrne cult in Australia, and we kept getting tracked down, possibly because of leaks in the social security system, and having to leave very quickly to a new city, and lived under assumed names.”

For the next five or six years, the three lived as fugitives. Christine travelled to Melbourne, then fled to Adelaide for six months, and on to Perth. As a teenager, Assange returned to Melbourne, living with his mother in at least four different refuges. The WikiLeaks founder was to act out this pattern of evasive action all over again in 2010, believing he was being pursued by US intelligence because of his WikiLeaks exposures.

Court files from the teenage Assange’s eventual hacking trial in Melbourne – of which more later – document some of the effects of such a strange life on a gifted teenager with a strong aptitude for mathematics. His lawyer said Assange was deprived of the chance to make friends or associate normally with his peers. “His background is quite tragic in a way.”
Underground
describes a “dead boring” Melbourne suburb: “merely a stopping point, one of dozens, as his mother shuttled her child around the continent trying to escape from a psychopathic former de facto [spouse]. The house was an emergency refuge for families on the run. It was safe and so, for a time … his exhausted family stopped to rest before tearing off again in search of a new place to hide.”

When Assange was 13 or 14, his mother had rented a house across the street from an electronics shop. Assange began going there and working on a Commodore 64. His mother saved to buy the computer for her older son as a present. Assange began teaching himself code. At 16 he got hold of his first modem. He attended a programme for gifted children in Melbourne, where he acquired “an introverted and emotionally disturbed” girlfriend, as he put it. Assange grew interested in science and roamed around libraries. Soon he discovered hacking. By the age of 17 he suspected Victoria police were about to raid his home. According to
Underground
: “He wiped his disks, burnt his printouts, and left” to doss temporarily with his girlfriend. The pair joined a squatters’ union, and when Assange was 18 she became pregnant. They married and had a baby boy, Daniel. But as Assange’s anxiety increased, and police finally closed in on his outlaw circle of hackers, his wife moved out, taking their 20-month-old son Daniel with them. Assange was hospitalised with depression. For a period he slept outdoors, rambling around the eucalyptus forests in Dandenong Ranges national park.