The Secret Life Read online

  ‘I am. It just needs to be done in a certain way. There’s a big fan base out there. They will buy this book if it contains the right message and inspires them.’

  ‘What do we need?’

  ‘It needs to be more like Ayn Rand.’

  I was stunned for a second. This was new. ‘I don’t know if I can help you with that,’ I said. He took out his phone and made another call about Afghanistan.

  *

  Back at Ellingham Hall the sun had chased all the gloom out of the dining room. I looked at the table next to the window and remembered, back in January, laying all the chapter cards there and trying to visualise a shape for the book. I hardly knew Julian then, but he looked over the layout and agreed to it, and I remember thinking this might be a good collaboration. At first, as we inspected those cards in the middle of the night, I thought he saw an opportunity laid out before him, to tell it like it was, to step out of all the bluster and tell the truth. But now, on this bright morning, I saw he liked fame more. He was talking to Sarah and me about his forthcoming trip to the Hay Festival. ‘You’ve been there, right?’ he said.

  It seemed mad to me that he was considering going to a book festival to talk about a book that wasn’t done, wasn’t published, and might never be published.

  ‘I’ll read one of those good writing parts of yours,’ he said. ‘And then I’ll read a new political thing. The latter will get the headlines and the first will surprise people.’ I was astonished. The Daily Telegraph was sending a helicopter to take him down to Hay. He wanted me to come with him.

  ‘I hate helicopters,’ I said. ‘I’m not coming to Hay to talk about a book that isn’t written. Even less, to talk about a book I was supposed to be helping you write in secret. Why would I do that?’

  ‘It might be good for fly on the wall,’ he said. ‘I’d like more fly on the wall in the book.’

  He kept saying he’d done some work on the early draft but he couldn’t find it. That afternoon, as I laid out a second draft plan for the book, Julian searched the laptops in the room – about eight of them – for his ‘marked-up’ version. There was something pathetic about the search: it was clear he had never marked up any version.

  He couldn’t really bear to think about it. He was relentlessly autobiographical in his speech, but he clearly felt trapped by the requirement to commit to a narrative that would become the ‘story’. The business of the marked-up text seemed to be decisive and I felt we were fucked. By now, he had found at least half a dozen major obstacles. When it wasn’t deadlines, it was his view that all biography is ‘prostitution’; when it wasn’t that, it was not having the time to read the material or being too tired to do the interviews, or needing six weeks on his own just to sit down and ‘focus’ on his vision, or hating the idea of all the money going to his lawyers. I’ve never been with anybody who made me feel so like an adult. And I say that as the father of a thirteen-year-old.

  We agreed I’d come back in a few days and all his marking up would be done. ‘I’m going to look for this for a while longer and then give up,’ said Julian, still examining laptops. At the same time, Tristan, one of his random young assistants, who was studying video production at Bournemouth, was looking through film footage that we might use for ‘scenes’ in the book. He gave me a hard drive to take away. When I got it home, I saw the main piece of footage (there are three hundred hours more) was of Julian having a shave as everyone watched.

  Under his bail conditions, Julian could make trips in the daytime so long as he was back at Ellingham Hall by 10 p.m. It was my birthday and I was having dinner with friends in the St Pancras Hotel when Julian rang to say he wanted to come to London. He arrived at my place the next day with two of his colleagues, a nice albino bloke whom I’d never met and a shy American girl. As soon as he came into the flat, Julian went off checking for bugs, he said, or exits, or the sleepover situation – these appear to be his priorities wherever he goes. I took him into the sitting room and he slumped on the sofa. He looked absolutely shattered, his clothes were done in and he seemed hunted. I asked if he was hungry and got him a slice of cake.

  By now he was referring to his lawyers as ‘cunts’. He told me Stephens accused him of hanging his arse out to dry by asking for the bill to be cut. ‘He’s made little cuts – twenty thousand pounds here, forty thousand there, but the bill remains disgusting,’ Julian said. In an hour’s time he was due to go down to Camden Town for a meeting with Gareth Peirce, the human rights lawyer, who he hoped would take on the job of representing him at the next appeal hearing.

  He hadn’t found the marked-up manuscript and hadn’t done any of the things we agreed. We’d lost another four days, and I’d tried to help him further by writing the thing he couldn’t write. I handed him a draft of the ‘personal vision’ stuff and he said he would read it that evening. ‘No, you won’t,’ I said. ‘This book isn’t going to happen, is it?’ He looked at me with a degree of honesty, I felt, for the first time. ‘You haven’t put pen to paper once in all these months. You find the whole thing difficult and you can’t face it. You now have to tell the publishers straight, you can’t do it.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’ve got to lead this thing. There’s over two million dollars and more than forty secondary publishers. You can’t keep mucking everybody about and thinking it’s going to be okay. Just stop the train now.’

  ‘The book will happen, but later …’

  ‘I know. But your contract is for now. And your contract is for an autobiography. Pay Canongate back the money you’ve taken from them. It’s important you pay them back. The others …’

  ‘Can sue me.’

  ‘Whatever you say. But nobody died. Just pay back the money and maybe you’ll have a book to write in a few years further down the line. There’s a reason many people don’t publish their memoirs until the end of their careers.’

  ‘Let’s leave it for a week,’ he said. ‘I’ll know my legal position better soon.’

  ‘Have a present,’ he said at the door. He gave me a tin of General White Portion, a kind of snuff. ‘From Sweden,’ he said with a smile. I shook my head and closed the door.

  ‘You’re the person holding this together,’ Jamie said when I eventually spoke to him. But I wasn’t happy to be that person. I didn’t sign up to be the executive producer. Then news came that the Icelandic publishers wanted to cancel their contract. Other foreign publishers were getting cold feet. Jamie wrote a letter to Julian and Caroline Michel and sent me a copy, with a covering note. ‘If this doesn’t wake Julian from his slumber,’ he said, ‘then I fear it is Game Over.’

  Julian phoned to ask if I’d reconsider and come on the helicopter to Hay the next day. I said I was looking after my daughter. He said to bring her too. ‘No,’ I said. With Julian, in every case, spectacle overrules tactics, and he couldn’t see that me stepping out of a helicopter at Hay with him was not a good idea. He also told me he had signed on the dotted line with Gareth Peirce.

  Sarah called to say she wanted to meet me and give me a hard drive. It was full of secrets and she had to hand it to me personally. She was having lunch with a friend in London and we arranged for her to come up in the afternoon. She arrived about 3 p.m. I made coffee and she sat at the kitchen table and unloaded about the organisation and Julian for two hours. ‘He’s like threatened to fire me a few times,’ she said, ‘and always for crazy reasons. One of the times was literally because I had hugged another member of staff. Hugged him, like a friend hug. Julian was like “that’s so disrespectful to me” and went off on one. He said I’d said the guy smelled nice and that was humiliating. He did smell nice; he’d just had a bath. Julian was furious. And once he was like “you’re the new Domscheit-Berg” and “you could do some damage if you left”. He won’t tell the others what my role is, so one time he’s like “you’re my number two” but he won’t say to the others. So, if I try to speak to Kristinn he’s like “who do you think you are?” because I’ve
got no like official authority. Only Julian has that.’

  She told me there had been a big bust-up over a deal in Canada because Julian, having negotiated with CBC and some Canadian press, was about to double-cross them at the last minute and she’d spoken up. He wouldn’t just overrule her: he had to spend hours convincing her he was right. ‘It happens all the time,’ she said. ‘He won’t do anything and I’ll keep reminding him, and then, like with the Canadian elections, he’ll jump into action at the very last minute. And he was about to make a massive mistake and I told him. Afterwards, he blamed me for the whole thing and said he’d come close to firing me over that but he probably wouldn’t.’

  We turned to talking about the book. ‘In fairness,’ she said, ‘he never wanted to do it. Mark Stephens was going on about a book and before you knew it Caroline Michel was involved and it was all this money and the thing was signed. He didn’t want to write a book but now he’s just letting it get worse and worse. He goes on the phone to Jamie to say stuff and then doesn’t say it.’

  ‘That’s a disaster,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t want people to see how his mind works.’

  I implied that it was weird for someone who liked the sound of their own voice to ask for a ghostwriter. As the conversation went on you could see she was strung between loving him and being baffled. She said she knew that he was only loyal to her because they were ‘stuck in that house’. As soon as he was free he would chase other girls. ‘He openly chats girls up and has his hand on their arse,’ she said, ‘and goes nuts if I even talk to another guy.’ She said he couldn’t stand her being away from him and didn’t think she should see friends or go on holiday or ‘abandon’ him at all.

  I asked about the sex allegations. I said that in all my time with him he hadn’t really clarified what happened. ‘It was weird,’ she said. ‘Like, why was he even staying with those girls? He didn’t rape them but he was really fucking stupid.’

  She said she now understood that people like Domscheit-Berg had a basic point. ‘I don’t agree with the way he did it,’ she said, ‘but you can tell he was probably just trying to say something true and got hated for it. That’s the way it is with Julian: he can’t listen. He doesn’t get it. He’ll try to get me to ring John Pilger at three in the morning. Some of these sureties gave fifty grand, basically because they were friends of Jemima’s, and he thinks he can get them to do stuff for him in the middle of the night. It’s crazy.’

  She said Julian had told her to try and persuade me to come to Hay tomorrow. I said I couldn’t. I had my daughter. I said I thought the whole trip was mad. Jamie thought he was going to read from the book and promote it in advance. In fact, he was just going to be interviewed and do the celebrity bit. All the discussions, all the threats, all the attempts at persuasion, and all my work, had come to nothing. Julian had known all along he would scupper the book. He just didn’t have the balls to tell us all he couldn’t do it.

  ‘I don’t think he’s got the right kind of psychology to be able to put his name to a memoir,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But he might want it to become like a fly-on-the-wall record of him.’

  That’s what this is, but he’ll hate this too. The impulse towards free speech, like Sarah speaking freely in my kitchen or me speaking freely now, is permissible only if it adheres to his message. His pursuit of governments and corporations was a ghostly reverse of his own fears for himself. That was the big secret with him: he wanted to cover up everything about himself except his fame.

  Reports reached me from Hay. Reactions to his appearance were mixed. He was described as looking puffy and unkempt. Ralph Fiennes, who was in the audience, described the event as ‘compelling’ but suggested it also made him feel deeply uncomfortable.

  *

  On 5 June I picked Julian up at Ellingham Hall and drove him to the police station. He got into the car with the print of bedsheets still on his face and his hair sticking up. ‘Life is so unjust,’ he said. ‘I was dreaming I was walking down this very long, steep, rickety path on a beach, many thousands of metres going down into the ocean. I got to a point where there were abandoned pieces of wetsuit, especially feet, and I was in bare feet and really wanted to go into the sea below. I went through the wetsuits and there were some Russian ones and some French ones that must have belonged to crab fishermen. I found one and was just pulling it on – I could see down into the water, and then this terrible alarm clock, Sarah, woke me up.’

  We called in at a breakfast place in Beccles. He said we should cancel the contract. He said he didn’t care what effect this decision would have on the Americans or on his agent, but he did feel bad for Jamie Byng and Canongate. I said again that he must make sure he paid Canongate back. He said that would happen and that his agents held the money. ‘You and I can keep working together,’ he said.

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said, ‘but this contract has either to be honoured or cancelled. There’s no middle way.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘And it will be cancelled. I regret it because I think it would be good to pre-empt the Swedish case. There’s going to be a lot of shit about me in the press there during the trial and they’re waiting to give their version, and I should get the truth out there before then.’

  He asked me to work for him as a kind of ‘official historian’, ‘coming in and out of the various countries and projects’. He said he thought there was a masterpiece of narrative non-fiction lying in wait. ‘You get to that over time,’ he said.

  ‘Not in a handful of months.’

  ‘Correct.’

  At that point, Sarah wrote to Caroline Michel that the contract should be cancelled. Jamie tried to persuade me to write Julian’s authorised biography, offering me half the royalties in advance (about $1.5 million), but I refused. Jamie had written to Sonny Mehta hoping the ‘rescue’ book could still be done. But, on the other line, as it were, Julian was telling me there would never be a second book.

  A meeting at Ellingham Hall attended by Sonny and others was excruciating. Sonny had to sit for two hours while Julian lectured him about power, corruption, the police state and the truth about publishing. The editor in chief of Knopf said almost nothing.

  The charade of Julian Assange writing a book finally came to an end at one o’clock at Cigala in Lamb’s Conduit Street. It was 159 days after Jamie had arrived at my flat to lay out the plan, and he came into the restaurant the same guy, not much defeated, and ready to go for another twelve rounds. During that time, Egypt and Tunisia had won a questionable freedom, Libya had gone to war, I’d toured Australia, my father had died, I’d given up smoking, and I’d managed to say nothing about the fact that Julian Assange had asked me to help him find his voice and then asked me to help him unfind it. It was a good season to be a listener and a bad one to be a talker, so I’d followed that ethos to the letter.

  It was Evelyn Waugh who said that when a writer is born into a family the family is over. And why would it be any different when a second family comes to call? Julian wanted a brother, a friend, a PR guru, a chief of staff, a speechwriter, and he wanted that person to be a writer with a reputation. When he was working with those fellows from the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, he allowed himself to forget that they were journalists with decades of experience and their own fund of beliefs. To him they were just conduits and possible disciples: he is still reeling, even today, from the shock that they were their own men and women. My discussions with him would go on, in private, long after the idea of ‘collaboration’ was over. But he consistently forgot that I am foremost a writer and an independent person. Julian is an actor who believes all the other lines in the play are there to feed his lines; that none of the other lives is substantial in itself. People have inferred from this kind of thing that he has Asperger’s syndrome, and they could be right. He sees every idea as a mere spark from a fire in his own mind. That way madness lies, of course, and the extent of Julian’s ly
ing convinced me that he is probably a little mad, sad and bad, for all the glory of WikiLeaks as a project. For me, the clarifying moment in our relationship came when he so desperately wanted me to join him on the helicopter flight to Hay. He wanted me to see him on the helicopter and he wanted me to assist him in living out that version of himself. The fact he was going to a book festival to talk about a book we both knew he would never produce was immaterial: he was flying in from Neverland with his own personal J. M. Barrie. What could be nicer for the lost boy of Queensland with his silver hair and his sense that the world of adults is no real place for him? By refusing the helicopter I was not refusing that side of him, only allowing myself the distance to see it clearly for what it was. And to see myself clearly, too: I have had to fight to grow away from my own lost boy, and it seemed right that day to fly a kite with my daughter and retain my independence from this man’s confused dream of himself.

  For the lunch with Jamie at Cigala, I asked that my agent Derek Johns come too, and suggested Caroline Michel should also be there. Before Caroline arrived, Jamie said he hoped the book could now become Assange by Andrew O’Hagan. He said he’d already begun to persuade Julian that this was not a book he could have a veto on, and that it would be the best chance of getting his message out. ‘He’s never going to be in this position again, with a writer he trusts, a writer who already knows the material. He says he’s willing as long as he could help set out what the book should contain.’

  ‘He might agree to that now,’ I said, ‘but he will make every effort to injunct that book come publication. Believe me. You are setting yourself up for a major nightmare by imagining that this first-person book, which he hates, can just be shunted into the third person and published. It’s the same material and he will oppose it.’

  Derek agreed. Jamie eventually saw that the book would not happen on those terms. The question of collaboration in that sense was over: even to pay Julian a penny would assume his authorisation and I wouldn’t work on another book given how the present attempt had failed. I told Jamie I would continue to follow the activities of the organisation in my own time and with no certain end in mind.