Weirdo and Narcissist

Roland White, writing in the Sunday Times recently, asks whether Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a noble and high-minded campaigner - or just another geeky weirdo and narcissist.

But I made up my mind on this particular point long ago.   

The madness of King Julian

The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a hero to some, but a friend’s revelations that he is a plate-licking egotistical ingrate casts the fugitive in a different light

By Roland White


Here is a question that may have been troubling your conscience. Is Julian Assange a heroic and noble campaigner for our freedom and liberty? Or is he actually, as some have long suggested, an annoying prat?

We are now a little closer to learning the truth, thanks to a lengthy article in the current London Review of Books. For Julian it will not make happy reading.

The article is by Andrew O’Hagan, the journalist and author who spent a large part of 2011 ghostwriting the memoirs of the WikiLeaks founder. For four months O’Hagan made pilgrimages to Ellingham Hall, the country pile in Norfolk at which Assange stayed under virtual house arrest while fighting extradition to Sweden, where he is accused of sex offences.

O’Hagan produced his book, but Assange decided he did not like the result. Remarkably, this did not affect the bond between the two men. The author is one of the few collaborators with whom Assange has not fallen out amid spectacular bitterness. Whether their friendship will survive the 26,500 words in the LRB is another matter. Because here is a taste of what O’Hagan reveals about his subject:

His table manners are terrible

The creator of WikiLeaks does not bother with knives and forks like the small people, but eats with his hands and licks his plate. O’Hagan watches as he not only demolishes a baked potato but also scoops up jam pudding — with his fingers. And please do not ask him for help with the washing-up. “Julian had a way of making himself, in his own eyes, impervious to the small matters that might detain others,” O’Hagan writes. “If you told him to do the dishes, he would say he was trying to free economic slaves in China and had no time to wash up.”

He wears Tesco tracksuit bottoms under his trousers

The financier Matthew Mellon, best known as the money behind Jimmy Choo, dropped by for lunch one day in his helicopter and promised Assange some new clothes. Sure enough, two Ozwald Boateng suits, a Turnbull & Asser shirt and a couple of ties later arrived by FedEx with a note from Mellon (who managed to spell tailor “taylar”).

On discovering that Boateng was of Ghanaian descent, Assange remarked: “That’s great. It fits the blacksploitation theme I’m hoping for with the film of my life.” Morgan Freeman, he hoped, might be available for the title role. Assange thought Boateng’s tailoring looked “a bit baggy on the arse” but it must have been an improvement on his previous suit, whose trousers were worn over a pair of Tesco tracksuit bottoms.

He is not a morning person

He was still asleep when O’Hagan arrived at Ellingham Hall for their first meeting. “I’m always trying to think of new ways to wake him up,” said his assistant and girlfriend, Sarah Harrison. “The cleaner just barges in. It’s the only way.”

He gets his girlfriend to check for concealed killers

As a condition of his bail, Assange reported to Beccles police station every afternoon. On one visit O’Hagan watched as Harrison got out of the car and started searching bushes by the station. “Is she checking for paparazzi?” the author wondered.

“I wish,” said Julian.

‘What then?”

“Assassins.”

He is not a caring employer

Assange once threatened Harrison with the sack for greeting another member of Team WikiLeaks with a friendly hug. “That’s so disrespectful to me,” he complained. She later confided to O’Hagan: “He’s, like, threatened to fire me a few times — and always for crazy reasons.” And this, let’s not forget, is his girlfriend.

He thinks everybody has got the hots for him
Speaking of Nick Davies, the Guardian reporter who worked on the first WikiLeaks stories, Assange revealed: “The problem was, he was in love with me. Not sexually, but just in love with me. Like I was this younger guy he wanted to be.”

He claimed Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic politician and WikiLeaks supporter, was also in love with him. And when visiting a Norfolk pub, he considered himself rather a hit with the local ladies.

He is a publishing pioneer

At one meeting he suggested an experimental format for the book: just one word in chapter one, two words in chapter two and so on. (He wanted to entitle it Ban This Book or, more bizarrely, Wet Cement). When O’Hagan produced a first draft — in conventional format — Assange wondered whether it could not be more like the work of Ayn Rand, the free-market philosopher and author of Atlas Shrugged. “I don’t know if I can help you there,” O’Hagan spluttered.

He is an ungrateful guest

For the past 18 months he has been hiding from British and Swedish justice at Ecuador’s embassy in London. Yet he does not seem all that grateful. He thinks the ambassador is “mad” and revealed how she went on a “ludicrous” diet after a set of unflattering pictures in the Daily Mail.

He is not a complete stranger to modesty

He rates himself merely the world’s third most important computer hacker. As a teenager he walked through the virtual corridors of Nasa, Bank of America and the Pentagon. We do not discover who is No 1, but Edward Snowden gets in at No 9. “Assange, like an ageing movie star, was a little put out by the global superstardom of Snowden,” O’Hagan says.

He secretly records conversations

Perhaps the biggest cheek of all. The man who made his reputation by exposing mass surveillance is not above using the same tricks himself. “One of Julian’s techniques is to tape conversations with friends and colleagues and then use them to ‘prove’ duplicity,” O’Hagan says. There is more, but perhaps you will not be surprised to learn that O’Hagan now thinks Assange is “mad, sad, and bad”.

The book was eventually published against the wishes of its subject, under the title Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Biography. Furious, Assange vented his rage at the nearest representative of the publisher, Canongate, who happened to be Harry Stopes, the author’s research assistant.

Assange then left the room, slamming the door behind him. Watching the retreating figure, Stopes delivered his considered verdict. Speaking perhaps for many people who have had any contact with Assange, he announced: “What a prat!”

Weirdo and Narcissist (25 February 2014)

The journalist who helped Julian Assange write his autobiography, only for the project to collapse later in acrimony, has given his account of why the life story of the WikiLeaks founder failed to make it into print - apparently Assange couldn't bear the thought of having his private life exposed to public scrutiny.

Which is really weird because WikiLeaks operates on the basis that powerful people and corporations are not entitled to secrets and privacy - on the principle that if the great and good are not getting up to mischief, then they why worry about the wider public knowing what' going on behind closed doors.

Transparency and openness are the watchwords except when it comes to Julian Assange, it seems.  

Julian Assange's ghost writer breaks silence on failed autobiography

WikiLeaks founder a mercurial character who could not bear his own secrets, according to writer Andrew O'Hagan

By Esther Addley

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange didn't want to publish an autobiography, says writer Andrew O'Hagan. Photograph: Geoff Caddick/AFP/Getty Images

The ghostwriter who collaborated with Julian Assange on his abortive 2011 autobiography has broken his silence to describe his months working with the WikiLeaks founder, which culminated in the acrimonious collapse of one of the highest profile and most lucrative book deals of recent times.

Three years after he was first introduced to the Australian, Andrew O'Hagan has now spoken out about how he worked with Assange on the book, which he said the publishers Canongate had sold in more than 40 countries for a total of US$2.5m before the deal dramatically imploded. In a lengthy, nuanced essay for the London Review of Books, a version of which he delivered in a lecture in London on Friday, O'Hagan describes working with a mercurial character who was, by turns, passionate, funny, lazy, courageous, vain, paranoid, moral and manipulative.

The book deal ultimately collapsed, O'Hagan writes, because "the man who put himself in charge of disclosing the world's secrets simply couldn't bear his own. The story of his life mortified him and sent him scurrying for excuses. He didn't want to do the book. He hadn't from the beginning."

Assange, he writes, was persuaded to agree to the autobiography by his lawyers who said the huge sums on offer would cover his mounting legal costs. He had initially been enthusiastic about the project, telling his ghostwriter that he "hoped to have something that read like Hemingway", and suggesting ever more avant garde styles for the book to take, such as writing the first chapter with one word, the second with two, and so on.

But O'Hagan reveals that as the deadline to deliver a manuscript approached, Assange was "totally shocked" at the prospect of his own story being told, describing people who write about their family as "prostitutes".

Exasperated at their author's non-co-operation and hoping to reclaim a proportion of their significant stake, Canongate published a version of O'Hagan's manuscript as Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Biography in September 2011 without the Australian's consent.

Though Assange denounced its publication, he told O'Hagan that he was covertly encouraging sales and tweeting links to its Amazon page. That strategy failed: despite its huge advance and publicity, the book sold fewer than 700 copies in its first week, a spectacular publishing failure.

O'Hagan, an award-winning, Booker-nominated novelist and non-fiction writer, was brought into the project in January 2011 when Assange was living with a group of supporters at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, while on bail over allegations of rape and sexual assault in Sweden.

The "studenty WikiLeaks charabanc" was at times bold and highly effective, writes O'Hagan – during the Egyptian uprising, when president Mubarak tried to close the country's phone network which was routed through Canada, he describes Assange and other staffers hacking into the Canadian telecom firm from their Norfolk kitchen table to reverse the Mubarak shutdown, then leaning back to eat chocolates as the revolution continued.

Former Cuban president Fidel Castro, the ghostwriter was told, had sent a message to say WikiLeaks was the only website he liked.

But the Australian's suspicion of the authorities led to a broader paranoia, writes O'Hagan, describing one car journey in which Assange demanded the writer pull off a small country road to avoid a white Mondeo that he was convinced was tailing them, but which turned out to be a taxi dropping a child off from school.

A trip to the local police station, which Assange was obliged to visit daily as a condition of his bail, was completed only after Sarah Harrison, described by O'Hagan as Assange's PA and girlfriend, had checked the bushes for assassins.

It was, by O'Hagan's account, an occasionally surreal life: one of those who flew to Ellingham Hall by helicopter to pay court was the billionaire Matthew Mellon, who later sent a delivery of Savile Row suits by designer Oswald Boateng which Assange then wore constantly.

When a group of company presidents offered a fee of £20,000 for an hour's Skype time with Assange, he told Harrison: "If Tony Blair – a war criminal – can get £120,000, I should get at least £1 more than him."

The WikiLeaks founder was highly vocal on the subject of former collaborators whom he now regarded as "enemies" – a long list to which his publishers would ultimately be added, writes O'Hagan, but among which the Guardian and New York Times were judged as particular offenders.

Assange regarded this newspaper as having "double-crossed" him, writes O'Hagan. "It was an early sign of the way he viewed 'collaboration': the Guardian was an enemy because he'd 'given' them something and they hadn't toed the line, whereas the Daily Mail was almost respected for finding him entirely abominable."

He describes the Australian as being "a little put out by the global superstardom" of Edward Snowdenfollowing his leaks to Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian. While Snowden was marooned in Moscow airport, writes O'Hagan, "Julian was keen to help him and keen to be seen to be helping him"; shortly afterwards Assange sent Harrison to Moscow where she acted for a time as the American's "legal advisor".

When he asked Assange "just how good" was Snowden, O'Hagan writes, he was told: "He's number nine." "In the world? Among computer hackers? And where are you?" "I'm number three."

The relationship between O'Hagan and Assange remained amicable throughout their collaboration – even as the book deal collapsed, Assange described it as a "close friendship" – and the two have remained on good terms until recently. (The Australian, he concedes, will "hate this" – meaning his lecture – but in signing on with a ghostwriter, Assange "forgot what a writer is, someone with a tendency to write things down and seek the truth".)

However, O'Hagan says Assange's contradictions "could rock you off your feet": during the making of The Fifth Estate, the recent Assange biopic (based in part on a book by Guardian journalists) which he angrily denounced, O'Hagan describes being called by Assange one day to suggest that the writer offer himself as a consultant to the movie and split his fee with him.

But while the ghostwriter writes of feeling "a kind of loyalty to Julian's vulnerability, especially (not in spite of) his role as enemy to himself", the "clarifying" moment in their relationship came in May 2011 when Assange had tried persuade O'Hagan to join him in flying to the Hay festival in a Daily Telegraph helicopter, to promote a book that by that time "we both knew he would never produce".

"He wanted me to see him on the helicopter and he wanted me to assist him in living out that version of himself he so craves. He was flying in from Neverland with his own personal JM 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?"

Pondering on the enigma that is Assange, O'Hagan concludes that it is difficult to determine whether the WikiLeaks founder is another Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers leaker, or John Wilkes, the 18th-century radical politician, or the fictional character Charles Foster Kane, who was "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."

Mysterious Plant (6 July 2013)

Ecuador's Embassy in central London is sovereign territory - a place where people go only at the invitation of its diplomatic staff.

For the past year the Embassy has become a 'home from home' for Julian Assange - who is on the run from UK authorities who wish to extradite the WikiLeaks founder to Sweden - where he faces charges of sexual assault made by two separate women.

In jumping his bail and making his way (equally mysteriously) to the Embassy in London - Assange was in defiance of court proceedings that he had given his solemn word to observe - and by that time Ecuador was, of course, giving support to a known fugitive.

A man wanted for questioning about alleged criminal offences in another friendly European country, namely Sweden.

So I can't surely be the only person to have found it hysterically funny when Ecuador announced the other day that it found a 'bug' in its Embassy offices - the unspoken allegation being that it must have been planted there by UK intelligence forces such as MI5.

Well if it was, then so what?

Because what right do these diplomats have to complain about anything when they are breaking laws in the UK and cynically abusing the asylum seeking process - by sheltering someone like Julian Assange.   

But I think it's much more likely that Julian planted the bug himself - or possibly someone acting on his behalf - because how could MI5 or anyone else just wander into the Ambassador's residence and fix a listening device underneath his desk, or in a flowerpot.

More like Johnny English than James Bond - if you ask me. 

No, the whole thing sounds like an amateurish publicity stunt - just the sort of thing that Julian and his pals would get up to as a way of trying to win some sympathy for a man who - quite ironically - believes that no one is entitled to have any secrets.

Unless his name is Julian Assange, of course.