The Secret Life Page 8
On 20 December 2010, three days after being released from prison and while under house arrest, I signed a contract with Canongate and US publisher Knopf. In it I agreed to authorise a 100,000–150,000 word book – part memoir, part manifesto – in order to fund legal defences and to contribute towards WikiLeaks’ operating costs. On the 7th of December 2010 Bank of America, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union folded to US pressure by arbitrarily and unlawfully cutting WikiLeaks off of its financial lifeline. The blockade continues … My legal defence fund was similarly targeted and closed.
The draft is published under the title Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography – a contradiction in terms. It is a narrative and literary interpretation of a conversation between the writer and me. Although I admire Mr O’Hagan’s writing, this draft was a work in progress. It is entirely uncorrected or fact-checked by me. The entire book was to be heavily modified, extended and revised, in particular, to take into account the privacy of the individuals mentioned in the book. I have a close friendship with Andrew O’Hagan and he stands by me.
The publisher has not been given a copy of the manuscript by Andrew O’Hagan or me. Rather, as a courtesy they were shown the ‘manuscript in progress’ by Andrew O’Hagan’s researcher, as an act of generosity, and for viewing purposes only – expressly agreed to by Canongate. Canongate physically took the manuscript, kept it, and did not return it to Mr O’Hagan or me.
Contrary to what the Independent reports, I did not pull the plug on the deal, nor was I unwilling to compromise. Rather, I proposed on 7 June 2011 to cancel the contract as it stood in order to write up a fresh contract with a new deadline. I informed the publishers … having explained that with the upcoming extradition appeal in the High Court and an ongoing espionage Grand Jury against me in Virginia, I was not in a position to dedicate my full attention to a book that would narrate my personal story and my life’s work. On 9 June 2011 I received an email from my agency, PFD, informing me that the US and UK publishers (Knopf and Canongate) were interested in renegotiating the form of the book, and insisting on cancelling the contract as it stood … It is this contract, that had been agreed to be cancelled by all parties, that Canongate is basing its actions on.
In a meeting on 20 May 2011 with Canongate publisher Jamie Byng, I verbally agreed to deliver the agreed 100,000–150,000 word manuscript by the end of the year. In a recorded phone conversation on (or the day before or after) 15 June 2011, Jamie Byng gave me assurances that Canongate would never, contrary to rumours given to me, publish the book without my consent. We would agree to restructure the book and the deadline, and draw up a new contract. In correspondence (24 August 2011) my agent wrote: ‘We are going to arrange for you to have a one-to-one meeting with Jamie’ … However, Jamie Byng ignored my agent’s attempts to arrange a meeting with me. My agent then informed me that Jamie Byng would refuse to take any of my calls. Despite this I and two members of my team tried repeatedly to contact him … During all this time we were unaware of Canongate’s secret plan to publish the manuscript without consent.
On 7 September, Canongate informed my agent that they wanted to print the unauthorised book Monday, 19 September 2011. I was advised by my lawyers that I had grounds for obtaining a quia timet injunction to prevent the printing … on the basis that the proposal amounts to an infringement of copyright, a breach of the agreement, plus a breach of my right not to have my work subjected to derogatory treatment.
On 16 September 2011, I wrote a letter to my publisher informing them of my intention to obtain a temporary injunction unless they agreed to make immediately available to QC Geoffrey Robertson a copy of the proposed book. In keeping with my rights under the contract, I requested five days for legal review of the manuscript by my own barrister, so that he could suggest any deletions reasonably required to protect our people from any adverse legal consequences that may arise from this publication. Jamie Byng attempted to extort legal immunity for his actions by refusing to give me even a single chapter of the book unless I signed away my right to take legal action against Canongate …
*
One of Julian’s techniques, again borrowed from the spymasters he purports to find criminal, is to tape conversations with friends and colleagues and then use them to ‘prove’ duplicity. My interviews with him were recorded contemporaneously, either on tape or in notes, and I had tapes running and notepads in my hand all the time I was with him. But his use of private recordings with Canongate seemed to me a new low. As for me, the statement that I ‘supported him’, that I was his friend etc., was out of order. He was using me. It was against my consistent wish that I not be dragged into the middle of this dispute. But in this dispute Julian considered everybody but himself a pawn. He was the king we were all obliged to protect. The fact was I supported Julian where I could, but I often couldn’t, and he knew it. I tried to give him as much encouragement as I could, seeing his point of view and all that, and I continued to do so, but my arguments with him were all in the open. The morning after Julian’s press release, Jamie wanted me to refute Julian’s claims and I said that he was just doing the same thing as Julian. I would tell my own version when the time was right, but my role in this was to be silent. Did any of them understand that?
I got the 6.30 a.m. train to London. The steward offered me a copy of the Independent. Coverline: ‘EXCLUSIVE EXTRACTS: JULIAN ASSANGE, THE UNAUTHORISED AUTOBIOGRAPHY’. Giant splash. Inside, the story went on to say that I had become ‘uncomfortable about the furore’ around Julian and his publishers and implied that this was why I’d decided that my name ‘will not appear on the memoir’. Nonsense: at my insistence, my name was never intended to appear on the book. I put my headphones on. Today programme, Nick Davies of Canongate: ‘We gave him a number of opportunities. We took the co-writer off the project.’
Having told me on the phone that he would covertly try to boost sales of the book and then not-too-covertly posting a link to its Amazon page on Twitter, Julian called again while I was standing in the corridor of King’s College London on Friday 23 September. He said that maybe the book should be published in America after all. ‘We could call it “The Authorised Version”,’ he said. I laughed. But later he started to campaign against the book. Jamie felt outraged by the untruths and distortions in Julian’s account, and sat down to write an open letter to him. On the advice of Colman Getty, the letter was never sent, but it was scathing and convincing. It pointed out that Julian delivered nothing, that he was breaching my wish to remain anonymous and that he should wait for my statement, one day, of what actually happened. It also stated that all advance money was paid to him via his lawyer and what happened to the money after that was nothing to do with Canongate.
Julian’s late-night online campaign had the usual effect of turning a bad patch into a vipers’ nest. He never really apologised to anyone, but got busy turning his publishers into the latest enemy, to go alongside Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Mark Stephens, the Guardian, the New York Times, my researcher, his former host at Ellingham Hall, the government of Australia, his activist friends in Iceland, and a host of others who’d dared to have their own views. There would be many more to come: Jemima Khan, the Big Issue, Barack Obama and Assange’s own political party in Australia. I stayed on good terms with him only as long as I did because I kept quiet.
He hadn’t wanted the book not to sell – vanity operates in odd ways – but the effect of his campaign was to hurt sales. And yet he couldn’t stop, going out of his way to distribute transcripts of private phone calls between him and Jamie, and publishing emails that he claimed showed Canongate’s trickiness. I wanted to warn him that they certainly had transcripts of our interviews, sittings in which he’d uttered, late at night, many casual libels, many sexist or anti-Semitic remarks, and where he spoke freely about every aspect of his life. There was little security consciousness at work in those interviews, and I calmed them down when preparing the manuscript. I removed things that were said in the heat
of the moment or that were too much or too jocular or just banter, but Canongate could have released them to the press at any time, rubbishing his notion that he did not want a ‘memoir’ and devastating him in his own words. I have those tapes still and they can be shocking. Canongate didn’t retaliate or wound him. Like me, they imagined he was under pressure and hoped that, through a combination of tolerance and care in the community, he would eventually stop all this and return to the work that had made him so interesting in the first place. ‘Why don’t you go after some baddies,’ I said to Julian, ‘and stop fighting with the people on your side?’
*
And here’s the hard bit. Those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the United Kingdom under Thatcher and Blair, those of us who lived through the Troubles and the Falklands War, the miners’ strike, the deregulation of the City, and Iraq, believed that exposing secret deals and covert operations would prove a godsend. When WikiLeaks began this process in 2010, it felt, to me anyhow, but also to many others that this might turn out to be the greatest contribution to democracy since the end of the Cold War. A new kind of openness suddenly looked possible: technology might allow people to watch their watchers, at last, and to inspect the secrets being kept, supposedly in our name, and to expose fraud and exploitation wherever it was encountered in the new media age. It wasn’t a subtle plan but it smacked of the kind of idealism that many of us hadn’t felt for a while in British life, where big moral programmes on the left are thin on the ground. Assange looked like a counter-warrior and a man not made for the deathly compromises of party politics. And he seemed deeply connected to the web’s powers of surveillance and counter-surveillance. What happened, though, is that big government opposition to WikiLeaks’s work – which continues – became confused, not least in Assange’s mind, with the rape accusations against him. It has been a fatal conflation. There’s a distinct lack of clarity in Julian’s approach, a lack that is, I’m afraid, only reinforced by the people he has working with him. When he heard I was writing this he sent me an email saying it was illegal for me to speak out without what he called ‘appropriate consultation’ with him. He wrote of his precarious situation and of the FBI investigation into his activities. ‘I have been detained,’ he said, ‘without charge, for 1000 days.’ And there it is, the old conflation, implying that his detention is to do with his work against secret-keepers in America. It is not. He was detained at Ellingham Hall while appealing against a request to extradite him to Sweden to answer questions relating to two rape allegations. A man who conflates such truths loses his moral authority right there: I tried to spell this out to him while writing the book, but he wouldn’t listen, sometimes suggesting I was naive not to consider the rape allegations to have been a ‘honey trap’ set by dark foreign forces, or that the Swedes were merely keen to extradite him to America. Because he has no ability to see through other people’s eyes he can’t see how dishonest this conflation seems even to supporters such as me. It was a trap he built for himself when he refused to go to Sweden and instead went into the embassy of a nation not famous for its respect for freedom of speech. (He moved there in August 2012, when I was still seeing him, and the book was over.) He will always have an answer to these points. But there is no real answer. He made a massive tactical error in not going to Sweden to clear his name.
Up to the time of writing, I did nothing to break with him or unsettle him. I have watched the collapse of a dozen good relationships he had and tried to discuss them with him, assuaging him much more than I probably should have. I resisted him firmly when he overstepped the mark – by telling me, for instance, that all my taped interviews with him should be destroyed – but I tried a different tack from the others, making myself available to him in the belief that he needed someone outside his immediate circle as he attempted to fight the forces that threatened him, including himself, and get back to his work. That is why I took so long to say what I’m saying now: I knew the truth would hurt him because the truth, after all, was not his friend. It takes a bigger person than Julian to see his own errors, and many of us, including several of those who stood bail for him, hung back and continued to flatter him with our tolerance. When Jemima Khan publicly broke with him, he didn’t pause to ask why a loyal supporter might become aggrieved; when I raised it with him he simply made a horribly sexist remark.
He began living in the Ecuadorian embassy a gestative nine months after the autobiography debacle had come to its end. When I first went to see him there he was in a corner room at the back of the embassy, surrounded by hampers from Harrods across the way – well-wishers’ presents to the incarcerated – and sitting at a grubby desk covered in snacks and papers. A running machine stood along one wall. He told me about a failed siege by the police and about some projects they were getting off the ground, but quickly, as always, turned to demolishing one of his supporters. He continued with his habit of biting the hand that fed him, satirising or undermining those who came to his aid. He said the Ecuadorian ambassador was mad and ‘stalked the corridor’. He said she thought she was fat and went on a ludicrous diet because she didn’t like the way she looked in the photographs taken by the Daily Mail. I was nice to him, too nice, asking him what I could do, and mentioned again the Verso project and the idea of me helping them to get that going. He showed interest but you saw it fading in his eyes.
On another visit, again around midnight, he told me I shouldn’t tell the police at the door of the embassy my name. ‘I didn’t,’ I told him. ‘I’m not obliged to tell them my name.’
‘They’re keeping a list of my visitors,’ he said. And then he asked if I’d heard of a film about him that was being planned by DreamWorks. I told him I had and that it was due to star Benedict Cumberbatch. I told him I knew Cumberbatch and that he was a good guy and a powerful actor. He talked about how the actor looked compared to how he looked. Sarah arrived and we laughed about some of the Ellingham Hall absurdities and all the things that had happened since then. Julian had lost all those appeals that had so preoccupied him, but was no less preoccupied and no less time-wasting. He was obsessing about the DreamWorks film and said it was bound to be a smear. He said he could get to see the script – presumably by hacking into someone’s email – but that he wouldn’t agree to Cumberbatch’s request for an interview because it would appear he was endorsing the film. Cumberbatch wrote to Julian repeatedly and was met with a friendly but hectoring attempt to stop the film they wanted to make. In the end, Julian wanted editorial control and I reminded him that creative people, including creative writers, could not be stopped from going their own way. Cumberbatch was sensitive to the problems, but he wasn’t going to be bullied. I could never fathom the distance between Julian’s idealism, on the one hand, and his wish to exploit vulnerability, on the other. The film, like the book, would serve to remind people of the important work he had, at his best, been trying to do. But Julian just worried about his enemies and how they would ‘use’ the ambivalences that any decent artist would bring to such a contradictory figure. His contradictions could rock you off your feet. He called me one day during the making of the DreamWorks movie, when I was in a supermarket in Camberwell. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ he said. ‘They’ll want you as a consultant on this film. Why don’t you say yes to that, and split the fee with me?’
‘Because I’m not interested in that,’ I said, ‘and if you want to oppose the film, why would you also want to make a profit from it?’
‘Why not?’ he said.
He sometimes seems like a cornered animal in the embassy. One day he asked me to come in to talk to him. As soon as I entered the room, a new, bigger room, but standard issue, messy, depressing, smelling of laborious boring hours, I could see he was disturbed about something. ‘I’ve received some intelligence that you’re preparing a book,’ he said. ‘That you have tapes and you’re going to talk about visiting me here in the middle of the night.’ I told him I’d made no plans to write a book, and had, as he knew,
turned down massive offers to do so. I reminded him I was a writer and that one day I might, and that it was normal for people to speculate about it. ‘Just tell me first if you’re going to,’ he said. ‘Come to me first.’
I said I would. And I said many conciliatory things without really believing them any more. His burst of distrust had shown me he would only ever see me as a servant, and in that moment the account I’m writing here became a reality. He did what he was now famous for doing, building the creature he most feared would come and get him, and I left that night in the knowledge that my time with him, over snowy nights and long crazy afternoons of denial, had brought me back to first position, as a writer. He was a character. It didn’t matter to me now whether he continued the work he’d started or stayed true to what he said. He was a figure out of Dostoevsky, a figure out of James Hogg or John Banville, and a figure most vitally out of me. I was now making him into a figment of my imagination and that was perhaps all he could ever really be for me. Sitting in that prison of his own peculiar making, Julian was by then a cipher, a person whose significance can scarcely be grasped by himself, though he is forced to live with it. Planet Julian was now the site of at least a dozen little implosions every month. His 2013 bid for the Australian Senate as chairman of the Wikileaks Party was a fiasco, not least because of the kind of inattention I had come to know so well. ‘Attending one out of the thirteen national council meetings of the party,’ the council member Daniel Mathews said as he resigned, ‘is a fairly low participation rate in one’s own party.’