Julian Assange is a criminal, a fabulist and an undisciplined, arrogant work-shy fraud who lacks an education while remaining a mannerless vulgarian.
In Assange’s fantasy world he is a warrior for justice; the truth is his WikiLeaks was a Trojan horse for hate. Assange did not set out to reveal what he believed to be the immoral, corrupt manner in which our allies in the West seek security in a dangerous world. He wanted to strafe the foundations of the complex, sensitive diplomatic communications that help keep us a step ahead of our enemies.
His betrayals raise him into treason’s hall of fame alongside Norway’s Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling, the Gunpowder Plot’s Guy Fawkes, and Marshal Philippe Petain who led Vichy France.
Et tu, Assange? No doubt. He is the Judas Iscariot of the digital age.
Assange describes himself as a journalist, editor and publisher. He is neither a journalist nor an editor – trained as either he would have handled his infamous leaks more responsibly – but he is certainly a publisher in the manner that so is anyone who posts a photograph of their kids on social media.
Recklessly dumping classified correspondence on a website is regarded as journalism by nobody.
Publisher too was Chelsea Manning who, while training in intelligence for the US Army, stole hundreds of thousands of secret files from her employer, hiding these in a CD dressed up as a copy of Lady Gaga’s The Fame album. Fame of sorts would come Manning’s way. She passed these files on to the recently established WikiLeaks.
It was being published from England by Townsville-born, Melbourne-raised Assange. He claims to have attended 37 schools but learnt very little at any of them, but he did study maths and computing at the University of Melbourne, leaving before any credentials loomed.
Assange first appeared on my radar in July 1995, when I edited a Melbourne newspaper and he was interviewed about drug “recipes” that could be found on the internet. He said anyone with a basic knowledge of pharmacology could make amphetamines, ecstasy, crack and “lots of versions of LSD”.
At the time he was part of a group of hackers and ran their operations from his mother’s house. Going by the name Splendide Mendax (roughly, glorious liar) Assange and his friends tricked their way into some significant websites in the days before computer security was so highly rated: it is estimated that today about 10 per cent of any company’s information technology budget is spent keeping out the likes of Assange.
In December the following year, court documents secured by The Australian show, Assange appeared at a pre-sentencing hearing in the Victorian County Court, where his crimes included hacking 11,000 computers owned by Canadian telecommunications company Northern Telecom. His Melbourne lawyer, Paul Galbally, told judge Leslie Ross: “One of the motives for these offences was that by leading on to these major computer sites, it gave you the power and enabled you to move from one site to the other.”
Ross believed Assange had wanted only to empower himself and had not sought personal gain, so he was spared a jail term but ordered to pay reparations of $2100.
The lucky hacker’s sense of victimhood was already well developed – it would flourish lavishly – and Assange told Ross “a great misjustice has been done and I would like to record the fact that you have been misled by the prosecution”.
He was, and remains, a first-class whinger. As former prime minister John Howard said more than a decade ago: “He’s just an attention seeker of the worst kind.”
When trying to attract the attention of London’s women, The Guardian reported, Assange went on a dating site using the pseudonym Harry Harrison and writing that he was 188cm tall and, according to the site’s online test, “87% slut”. “He began: ‘WARNING: Want a regular, down to earth guy? Keep moving … I am DANGER, ACHTUNG!’ ”
The 2010 WikiLeaks documents made Assange’s name and reputation. The tidal wave of documents was released to left-leaning newspapers, most of which had once been esteemed but by then were living off the momentum of the past. These included The Guardian, The New York Times, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
All defence forces in all conflicts commit regrettable acts that end in the death of innocents.
Ten million civilians were killed in World War I, not too many intentionally but more than the number of combatants. It is estimated that perhaps 85 million people died during World War II, maybe 25 million of whom were combatants.
On the night of March 3, 1945, towards the end of that conflict the RAF mistakenly bombed the Dutch village of Bezuidenhout killing 532 locals. It’s war. It happens, as we saw with the recent accidental killing of aid workers in Gaza.
WikiLeaks’ most acclaimed exclusive was video of the killing of a group of Iraqis dubbed Collateral Murder. US soldiers in Baghdad had come under fire and sent up an Apache helicopter that spotted a group of locals, some appearing to hold military equipment.
The audio and vision of that episode reveal on-edge, no doubt inexperienced, young American soldiers watching these men. They fire upon them killing them all, including two Reuters journalists. It is a dreadful event. But it is also war. Inadvertent tragedy is regrettable but common. Were these killings avoidable? Perhaps.
The nature of communications between even allied nations is necessarily secret and robust. Who can forget WikiLeaks revealing that America’s man in Australia thought Australia’s then prime minister Kevin Rudd had made “significant blunders”, or that Rudd told a group of visiting US congressmen “the national security establishment in Australia was very pessimistic about the long-term prognosis for Afghanistan”.
But these sometimes petty, sometimes vindictive conversations allow the free flow of opinions between and about countries. The cogs of diplomacy would jam if leaders and diplomats thought nothing they uttered was private. It is why they were labelled secret and why Manning and Assange are guilty of towering crimes.
Paul Monk, a specialist in international relations, an author and former senior Australian intelligence analyst, has been monitoring the Assange case for years.
“There have always been people – most famously Daniel Ellsberg (who stole and released the Pentagon Papers revealing American strategies during the Vietnam war) – who have leaked things for what they believe to be principled reasons,” he says. “One can debate back and forth whether they made a correct judgment.” Monk insists Assange is not in that category.
“Assange has openly said that he wants to make it impossible for the diplomatic and security system to work,” Monk says, adding that Assange has character flaws rather than “some great insight into the ways our diplomatic services and intelligence agencies function”. Unlike Ellsberg, Assange had never worked inside and understood the system “he openly said he wanted to wreck”. He never understood what purposes it served. “He’s plainly intelligent, but somehow he became a self-obsessed narcissistic rebel.”
Ellsberg assumed he would be jailed for life for his crimes, the price he was prepared to pay for what he saw as a moral duty.
“Assange thinks it’s outrageous that they want to arrest him,” Monk says.
Manning passed the first files to WikiLeaks in February 2010. She was arrested in May and charged with theft, computer fraud and abuse, disobeying orders and, more seriously, aiding the enemy, for which an offender can be executed. Prosecutors did not seek the death penalty and on conviction Manning received a 35-year jail term that Barack Obama commuted after seven years.
Assange faces 18 charges in the US over the stolen WikiLeaks documents and could be sentenced to a combined, but improbable, 175 years. His pressing legal issue in 2010 was a series of possible charges of rape and sexual molestation arising from a visit to Sweden. Interpol posted a Red Notice seeking his arrest. He was detained briefly in London, bailed and continued working at WikiLeaks while dealing with the Swedish claims. Assange always denied them, but in August 2012 he sought asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London and was granted Ecuadorian citizenship.
Ecuador’s hypocritical left-wing president, Rafael Correa, hated his country’s free press but admired Assange. An embassy office was remodelled for him with a bathroom and kitchenette, and the embassy kitchen provided him with food – supporters sent him endless hampers from Harrods – and allowed him to buy a cat. But the house guest quickly turned into a house pest.
Assange reportedly was unclean, ungrateful and unmanageable. The Ecuadorians were patient with their unexpected lodger, whose stay cost them $10m, mostly on security. By 2019 they had enough, cancelled his citizenship and invited London police to enter and arrest him.
To describe his rooms as a pigsty is an insult to pigs. Ecuador’s ambassador, Jaime Marchan, took London’s Daily Mail through them, saying Assange “had to be reminded of normal standards of behaviour all the time. He would always leave the cooker on.” The veteran diplomat added: “The asylum system is to protect innocent people. (He) abused it. He is a predator.”
Marchan said the Australian had a disgusting way of protesting against what he thought unfair treatment: “When Assange wanted to be unpleasant he put excrement on the walls and underwear with excrement in the lavatory. We had to remind him to flush the toilet and clean the dishes.”
Assange – who was given the run of almost the entire embassy building in up-market Belgravia – played loud music and refused to clean up after his cat.
Marchan added with irritation: “We have proved Ecuador respects human rights but he didn’t comply with his obligations. He is very selfish. I told him, ‘One day you’ll realise how much Ecuador did to protect you.’ ”
These days Assange is held in Belmarsh prison, just outside Woolwich in southeast London. He has already written to King Charles to complain about his conditions. Other famous inmates have included disgraced former British cabinet member Jonathan Aitken, who described the jail’s “stillness of the morning … amazingly peaceful – Belmarsh was as quiet as a becalmed battleship”. One of author Jeffrey Archer’s most serious complaints when held there was not being able to purchase bottled Highland Spring water.
Acclaimed Scottish author Andrew O’Hagan was approached by a publisher to write Assange’s life story – to be known as WikiLeaks versus the World: My Story by Julian Assange – and for a time was embedded in the activist’s life as both men tested each other to see if it would work.
O’Hagan is Glaswegian tough, but he had never encountered anyone like his subject. By then Assange had fallen out with almost everybody, including the editors of the newspapers he had chosen to publish WikiLeaks. O’Hagan observed: “He had a strange, on-the-spectrum inability to see when he was becoming boring or demanding. He talked as if the world needed him to talk and never to stop. Oddly for a dissident, he had no questions.”
In between Assange boasting that Cuban dictator Fidel Castro had said he loved WikiLeaks, O’Hagan noticed that he “tended to eat pretty much with his hands. People in magazine articles say he doesn’t eat, but he had three helpings of lasagne that night and he ate both the baked potato and the jam pudding with his hands.”
Later, the author rented a house nearby. “I made lunch every day and he’d eat it, often with his hands, and then lick the plate. In all that time he didn’t once take his dirty plate to the sink. That doesn’t make him like Josef Mengele, but, you know, life is life.”
Hypocrisy, bad taste and other follies of 2024
On New Year’s Day 2024, morale was relatively high since the Year of the Dragon was expected to usher in a time of rational thinking. Not quite how it worked out.
Deeply weird: Why we can’t look away from this real-life Squid Game
The singularly quirky culture that gave birth to Netflix’s dystopian survival thriller, and the menacing shadow of its evil twin, shapes South Korea’s turbulent politics.