The Secret Life Read online

  ‘But you’ve railed against autobiography. You must make it clear to them or they won’t accept it. Jamie and his colleagues have been selling this around the world on the understanding that it’s your life story. You’ve allowed them to do that and you’ve allowed me to write that based on my interviews with you these last two months.’

  ‘This will sell even better. And Sonny Mehta seemed much more excited by the idea of a manifesto than some standard autobiography.’

  ‘Okay. Make it clear to them.’

  ‘The book I’m describing is the book I’ve always said I would write.’

  ‘It wasn’t the book you were writing when you stayed up with me all night telling me your stepfather was an alcoholic.’

  ‘That’s not going in the book. None of that was meant for the book and that’s why it was a mistake ever to let them see this early draft, because it has contaminated their minds.’

  *

  Even if you were the most radical dude on campus, there was always some tight hippie ready to tell you that you were bourgeois for liking, say, Earl Grey tea or for reading Anthony Powell. In the same vein, Julian scorns all attempts at social graces. He eats like a pig. He marches through doors and leaves women in his wake. He talks over everybody. And all his life he has depended on being the impish one, the eccentric one, the boy with a bag full of Einstein who liked climbing trees. But as a forty-year-old, that’s less charming, and I found his egotism at the dinner table to be a form of madness more striking than anything he said.

  The next day when Julian turned up at the house in Bungay there was soup. He nodded for some and Harry put it down. Julian continued tapping into his laptop. My head was full of the previous night, when Jamie had called after midnight to discuss the problem. ‘We’ve sold this book to forty publishers around the world on the basis that it’s his autobiography,’ he said, ‘and if this motherfucker wants now to denounce that kind of book we’ll cancel the contract. I have such a strong feeling for what they’ve done as an organisation, but if he does this he will hurt Canongate and all the others. It’s unbelievable.’ Jamie kept coming back to the ‘irresponsibility’ of someone signing and taking large sums to write a book they couldn’t countenance. ‘We love this early draft and it has the makings of a bestseller that will rescue his reputation. What is he thinking? I’m going down to see Sonny right now.’

  In the morning, Jamie had sent me a copy of the contract between Canongate and Knopf and Julian. It contained an addendum, written by Sonny just before it was signed, which detailed what the book must include. It was all standard autobiography stuff plus a paragraph about his ideas. The clear expectation was that he would deliver a life story with childhood, parents, the hacking years, the trial, and the setting up of WikiLeaks.

  This was all in my head as we sat down at the table in Bungay, me, him, Sarah and Harry the researcher. After a few minutes of Julian tapping into his laptop, I asked him if he’d heard anything from Caroline, his agent. ‘They’re all panicking,’ he said. ‘They’re such schoolgirls.’

  ‘Jamie sent me the contract,’ I said. ‘It’s clearly different from what you were discussing yesterday.’

  Julian said, ‘Have we got it?’ Sarah produced a copy on her laptop. He looked at it and immediately focused on the one clause that mentioned his philosophy and said: ‘See, it’s there.’

  Sarah: ‘No. Look at the first few clauses. That’s what Andy’s talking about.’

  Julian: ‘See, there it is. My philosophy.’

  Me: ‘You’re homing in on the bit that suits you. The rest of the addendum stipulates your life story.’

  Julian: ‘I don’t see what the problem is. Something like that can be interpreted as the book I’m writing. We can give them any book and they’ll like it: the food will cause the appetite.’

  Sarah: ‘You’re now saying a manifesto, a very different sort of book from what they’re suggesting here.’

  Julian (shouting): ‘I’m fucking never talking to anybody again. They take what they want to hear and twist it through their own paranoia to only hear what fits.’

  I looked at Harry. ‘Julian, you said that Sonny would be happy with a manifesto but it’s clear what he expects.’

  Julian: ‘They need to stop interfering with the soup while it’s being cooked. Who’s actually read it?’

  Me: ‘Jamie Byng, Nick Davies, Dan from Knopf and Sonny Mehta.’

  Julian: ‘I thought it was just the two editors?’

  Me: ‘No. Jamie was always going to read it. And then they must have given it to Sonny.’

  Julian looked at Harry. ‘I thought you were invigilating. You were supposed to take the manuscript away.’

  ‘At the end of the day,’ Harry said, ‘I’m employed by Canongate. I couldn’t refuse when they wanted to keep it. They’re my employers.’

  Julian: ‘I gave you strict instructions not to let them boss you around. You should have taken it and walked out.’

  Harry: ‘They’re my employers. I couldn’t do that.’

  Me: ‘You can’t expect him to go against them. This is ludicrous.’

  Julian: ‘I’m unspeakably angry. I didn’t know your loyalty was to them … a publisher’s spy in the drafting process.’

  Harry: ‘Do you mean me?’

  Julian: ‘Yes.’ At which point he went into the garden, slamming the door behind him.

  Harry: ‘What a prat.’

  Julian stood in the garden and stared over the fields. In the past, Sarah had covered for him when he was out of order, but now she didn’t. She just apologised and said it was crazy. After a few minutes, Julian came back and picked up his things, saying nothing. Eventually: ‘Sarah, pack up.’ He left the house and they drove away. About ten minutes later I got a text from him saying he wasn’t angry with me and was sorry not to have said goodbye. Harry asked if he’d done anything wrong. Of course, he hadn’t. He didn’t even remember calling Julian a prat.

  Caroline Michel was due to arrive for an 11 a.m. meeting at Ellingham Hall. Julian called me and asked if I’d sit in. ‘That’s fine,’ I said, though I felt it was yet another irregularity. He came and picked me up on the way to his signing-in at Beccles police station. In the car, he railed against his lawyers, alleging Mark Stephens had brought in his own team. He asked me how a writer normally gets an agent. ‘Well, you go and see a few of them. Then you make a decision about which one’s best for you.’

  ‘See. That’s what I mean. I didn’t see anyone. Mark Stephens brought in Caroline and now I’ve got this whole situation … Everyone’s making money out of this.’

  Back at the house, Sarah was more depressed than I’d ever seen her. She implied that last night had been difficult and she’d had to take some of the blame for seeming to agree with us in the dispute over who got to read the manuscript. Julian’s habit was to turn these young staff members on and off like a tap: he knew they were devoted to him and he took pains to out-manoeuvre them, even when there was no real need. Sarah sat very sullen on the sofa in the drawing room and barely looked up.

  ‘What’s wrong with Sarah?’ Caroline whispered when she arrived from the station.

  ‘A bit depressed,’ I said. We went into the kitchen and I stood with my back to the Aga.

  ‘The first thing I have to say is this is a brilliant read,’ she said. ‘So exciting. Gosh. Just fabulous.’

  ‘Please don’t say that,’ Julian said. ‘If you say that to the publishers they’ll just want to publish it.’ Caroline looked at me as if she had taken a wrong turning into the Twilight Zone. ‘How did you get the manuscript anyhow?’ he asked.

  ‘Sonny gave me his copy.’

  Julian immediately went white and began to shake with rage. ‘See! That’s what I fucking mean,’ he said. ‘Passing round the manuscript! No one except those two editors was supposed to see it and I’m just fucking furious.’

  ‘Don’t be furious,’ said Caroline. ‘It doesn’t matter …’

  ‘It doe
s matter! Manuscripts flying across the Atlantic!’

  ‘Julian, come on,’ I said. ‘You can’t complain about your agent reading it.’

  ‘I don’t mind her reading it, but WHO ELSE is reading it?’

  Caroline had tactfully started calling the ‘manifesto’ stuff the ‘vision part’, which was likely to appeal more to the publishers. But whenever she spoke of what she liked about the autobiographical material in the draft, he shut her down. She plunged on, trying to sew the various bits of opposition into a seamless pattern, but there was a lot of optimism in what she said. He said he thought the book could come out in 2012. ‘How about July for delivery?’ she said.

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘But let’s try.’ He said more about how he’d like the book to be and she brought out the part of the contract written by Sonny. She said what he was saying met the requirements of the contract. It didn’t, and I wondered what her strategy was, but I’d said as much as I wanted to say. Eventually, Julian agreed to two things. He would mark up the draft, showing what was publishable, by his lights, and striking out what wasn’t. And then he would sit down and write the ‘vision bit’. He said he would start right away and in three or four weeks, if we left him alone, he would have it.

  I spent most of the next few weeks in Scotland on family business. Julian sent me a message while I was in the Highlands saying ‘Big up, Mr O’Hagan,’ a reference he knew I would get to what a convict had written to him in prison: ‘Big up, Mr WikiLeaks.’ Other than that, and a few hellos through Sarah, we hadn’t spoken since the day he agreed to start writing.

  I rang Caroline on 9 May and repeated that the book could be completed but Julian had to want it to happen. Then Jamie rang. He said Julian hadn’t done much at all and was on ‘radio silence’. Jamie, as often on this project, went from being conciliatory to being outraged, and again began to talk about cancelling the contract. ‘He’s in breach,’ Jamie said, ‘and if the book is pushed beyond September the publishers around the world will begin cancelling.’

  Julian was getting a lot of flak in the press for making WikiLeaks employees sign contracts threatening them with a £12 million lawsuit if they disclosed anything about the organisation. It was clear he didn’t see the problem. He has a notion that WikiLeaks floats above other organisations and their rules. He can’t understand why any public body should keep a secret but insists that his own organisation enforce its secrecy with lawsuits. Every time he mentioned legal action against the Guardian or the New York Times, and he did this a lot, I would roll my eyes, but he didn’t see the contradiction. He was increasingly lodged in a jungle of his own making and I told Jamie it was like trying to write a book with Mr Kurtz.

  Caroline and I made another visit to Norfolk. When we arrived, Julian hugged us both. ‘Hello, friend,’ he said to me, in a rather formal way – clearly he was gesturing towards my father having died since we last met. The Boateng suit was now grubby and he seemed imprisoned in it. That morning was the point where it all went to another level of ghastliness. He had developed a proper siege mentality. I thought this must have to do with Vaughan and the bad atmosphere at Ellingham Hall, but it was more than that: he had grown to feel his lawyers were the enemy. ‘It’s disgusting,’ he said, when we sat down with Caroline in the drawing room. ‘I’m not doing any more work on the book until it’s guaranteed that the money is not going to the lawyers.’

  ‘Well, it goes where you want it to go.’

  ‘Disgusting …’

  ‘Nobody pays their full lawyers’ bill,’ Caroline said.

  ‘I’m not paying it. They’ve charged me for sitting on a fucking train. I should never have stayed in this country in the first place: I should have flown this jurisdiction.’

  ‘Yes, well, let’s … There’s a lot of pressure coming from the publishers.’

  ‘I’m on strike. I would rather hack my leg off than let someone fuck me. Do you know how much the whole Max Mosley case cost? Four hundred thousand pounds. Do you know how much Tesco v. the Guardian cost? Four hundred thousand pounds.’

  ‘How much do you think they should be paid?’ Caroline asked.

  Julian named a figure.

  ‘I think it’s going to have to be a bit more than that,’ she said.

  *

  A week later Julian called to say there ‘might be time’ to look at the book. The question of time was always bizarre. He said he couldn’t meet these impossible deadlines, but while the ship was going down, he didn’t miss a single interview, festival or award ceremony, and he gave fancy reasons for that about feeding his public.

  After snow and what seemed like months of rain, the garden at Ellingham Hall was now in full bloom. Nobody was up when I arrived except Vaughan Smith, who opened the door and chatted to me in the kitchen. Vaughan wasn’t aware I knew anything about the tension between him and Julian and he understandably fished for detail about how it was all going. I didn’t tell him much, though it must have been obvious to him how chaotic things were. He was critical of the people around Julian and said that nearly everyone who came into contact with him was looking to make something. Whether he knew it or not, Smith himself was constantly accused of this, mainly by Julian.

  Julian came downstairs laughing and asked me to come with him to the police station. We jumped in the car with Sarah driving and he started excitedly telling me about some people he’d got in Afghanistan who were trying to find out about bias in the Afghan media. It emerged, over a few telephone calls in the car, that the guys in Afghanistan had no contacts and were stuck for something to do, so Julian called Kristinn Hrafnsson, his Icelandic colleague, who tried to drum something up. I later heard Julian call a contact at an activist group to find some people on the ground who might direct his people to a story. It was impressive to see him, on the way to the police station, doing the work of a journalist, and he was good at it. When he wants, he can deploy a kind of ethical charm that gets things done. The woman gave him some numbers and he passed them on to his crew. I say ‘crew’, because I believe they were the ones doing the cable TV show based on WikiLeaks’s work around the world. Along with legal arguments and his fights with various media groups, this was his major preoccupation for months. In the car, we also discussed Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning documentary film-maker who was slated to do a film on Julian (it came out in 2013). ‘There’s a problem of editorial input,’ Julian said. ‘We want to have some control. But the guy is like quite underhand. He has that arrogance. Then he sent a colleague to talk to us and we’re so used to people recording me that we had her frisked for recording devices, and he sent this furious message about what a terrible insult etc.’ Julian was always very interested in the movie arrangements being cooked up. ‘Movie rights’ on the book were uppermost in his mind. He talked about them a lot, though he also spoke critically of the film-makers who had expressed interest in him. He was happy to dismiss Paul Greengrass, Alex Gibney or Steven Spielberg with a flick of the tongue.

  The three of us went to a very pink cafe in the town and ordered sandwiches and cakes. We sat outside, and Julian got distracted by some young girls walking past. ‘Hold on,’ he said, and turned his gaze. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It was fine until I saw the teeth.’ One of the girls was wearing a brace. When Sarah came back and asked what we were talking about, Julian said he’d been admiring some fourteen-year-old girls, ‘until they came close’. I record this not to show how predatory Julian is – I don’t believe he is any more predatory than hundreds of men I’ve known. It’s not that: I tell it to suggest how self-delighted he can be. He doesn’t at all see how often his self-delight leads him into trouble. He doesn’t understand other people in the slightest and it would be hard to think of a leader who so reliably gets everyone wrong, mistaking people’s motivations, their needs, their values, their gifts, their loyalty, and thereby destroys their usefulness to him. He was always very solicitous with me when I was with him, but I could tell he responded much more to the fact that I like
a joke than to the notion that I was a professional writer. The latter mattered to him for five seconds when he was trying to find a writer to work with, but it was the time-wasting, authority-baiting side that really kept our relationship alive. He thought I was his creature and he forgot what a writer is, someone with a tendency to write things down, and perhaps seek the truth and aim for transparency.

  He was in a state of panic at all times that things might get out. But he manages people so poorly, and is such a slave to what he’s not good at, that he forgets he might be making bombs set to explode in his own face. I am sure this is what happens in many of his scrapes: he runs on a high-octane belief in his own rectitude and wisdom, only to find later that other people had their own views – of what is sound journalism or agreeable sex – and the idea that he might be complicit in his own mess baffles him. Fact is, he was not in control of himself, and most of what his former colleagues said about him just might be true. He is thin-skinned, conspiratorial, untruthful, narcissistic, and he thinks he owns the material he conduits. It may turn out that Julian is not Daniel Ellsberg or John Wilkes, but Charles Foster Kane, abusive and monstrous in his pursuit of the truth that interests him, and a man who, it turns out, was motivated all the while not by high principles but by a deep sentimental wound. Perhaps we won’t know until the final frames of the movie.

  Sitting outside the cafe, he was mulling over some more recent wounds. ‘I suppose it would look right, to show leniency. He should be told I am making a gesture of generosity.’ He was talking about Harry Stopes.

  ‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘He’s a research assistant and this should be forgotten about.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have called me a prat behind my back.’

  ‘He didn’t do it behind your back. He said it to your face, but you were busy slamming the door at the time.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘The much more important thing is how we get this book done. I’ve got to move on soon. I was only supposed to be helping you until the first of April. The trouble is you’re just not focused on this book.’