Julian Assange is a free man, having set foot on home soil for the first time in almost two decades. One suspects he will be feted as a truth seeker and hero of free speech. The reality is somewhat different, with Assange’s whistleblowing, such as it is, deeply mired in anti-US sentiment.
Canberrans might chance across Assange over the next day or so. One might catch a glimpse of him sidling into the linen press for old time’s sake or settling into a walk-in-robe, possibly with a cat. Careful, folks. He’s not house trained. Assange, that is. The cat uses the litter box.
Assange’s release from a courthouse was a victory for quiet diplomacy. Regardless of what people think of him, the WikiLeaks founder had spent too much time in prison. Indicted under the Trump administration, he was facing a life sentence for a raft of espionage charges. His plea deal puts an end to 14 years of legal strife although the fact remains that Assange’s fixations on transparency in government have been largely limited to exposure of US government excesses and outrages while maintaining a softly, softly approach on some of the world’s worst autocracies.
In 2010, the Stockholm District Court ordered his arrest for rape, unlawful coercion and three counts of sexual molestation. European arrest warrants were issued. In 2012, the UK Supreme Court found that Assange should be extradited to Sweden but Assange fled to the Ecuadorean embassy and remained there for almost eight years before he wore out his welcome and was dispatched to Belmarsh Prison.
During his period in the embassy, Assange brooded that the Kremlin was a “bulwark against Western imperialism”. A year before Russia’s brutal and illegal annexation of Crimea, Assange blamed the US for heightened tensions in the region, accusing the Americans of “trying to draw Ukraine into the Western orbit, to pluck it out of Russia’s sphere of influence”. After the annexation of Crimea, he said Washington and its intelligence allies had “annexed the whole world” through global surveillance.
In 2016, WikiLeaks published material that revealed the US had bugged discussions between UN officials and European allies, including private climate-control talks between then chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and the UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon. The revelation came with a view that the recordings had been lifted from the US National Security Agency by another so-called whistleblower, Edward Snowden. Journalists given direct access to all of Snowden’s stolen material would later confirm the bugging of Merkel and Ban Ki-moon was not part of it.
So who was the source of that information? If it wasn’t Snowden then either there was another source of leaks from within the NSA or, more likely, the provenance of the material was Russian intelligence services.
In 2017, then CIA director Mike Pompeo launched a blistering attack on Assange and WikiLeaks. “It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is … a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia. In January of this year, our intelligence community determined that Russian military intelligence – the GRU – had used WikiLeaks to release data of US victims that the GRU had obtained through cyber operations against the Democratic National Committee. And the report also found that Russia’s primary propaganda outlet, RT, has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks.”
This in turn led to some tit-for-tat nonsense that the CIA considered killing Assange. There is no reliable source of information and the general view within the CIA was that Assange was not worth the trouble.
But one regime does murder its political opponents. In February, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was killed while serving a 19-year prison sentence in a Russian prison near the village of Kharp in the Russian Arctic. Assange’s wife, Stella could see parallels. “Julian is a political prisoner and his life is at risk. What happened to Navalny can happen to Julian,” she told reporters outside court where a large crowd was demanding Assange’s release.
Four months later, the obvious difference between the two men is that Assange is alive and free to do as he pleases in Australia, courtesy of the US, while Navalny was almost certainly murdered in one of Russia’s most awful prisons.
WikiLeaks under Assange had published the Syria File, detailing outrageous human rights abuses by the Assad regime that contained not a word of criticism for Syria’s key ally, Russia. When the time came for Assange to direct his attention to the Russian Federation, he did refer to Putin’s Russia as “a Mafia state”.
Meanwhile, during the FIFA World Cup in Russia, Putin rushed to the defence of Assange. “What is he persecuted for? For sexual crimes?” Putin said. “Nobody believes that, you do not believe that either. He is being persecuted for spreading the information he received from (the) US military regarding the actions of the USA in the Middle East, including Iraq.”
Since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Assange has been banged up in Belmarsh Prison. We don’t know if he continues to believe that the US is to blame for Russian aggression.
It is almost certainly true that Assange has, as Pompeo declared, been circulating Russian intelligence to embarrass the West, and the US in particular. Most of Assange’s colleagues, current and former, maintain that Assange would not do so directly as he would not trust the Russian FSB. A hacking group under the aegis of the FSB, however, is no great stretch of the imagination.
The prevailing view is that Assange is more Putin’s useful idiot than stooge, motivated not by lofty ideals of government accountability and transparency but by evening up old scores and settling personal vendettas.
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