The Secret Life

by Andrew O'Hagan

  *

  ‘Did you miss me?’ Julian asked when I came back from a spell in London. He was eating two bars of Violet Crumble (Australia’s answer to the Crunchie). I said there’d been speculation in the press about my involvement with him, that it was quite difficult, I’d known a lot of these people for years, they were friends, and not answering emails or confirming stories was tough.

  ‘Well, you could just come out in support of me,’ Julian said.

  ‘That’s not the deal,’ I said. ‘I’m anonymous. There’s no point in this otherwise.’

  Sarah was clicking on her laptop. ‘That’s quite good,’ she said. ‘I’ve got you twenty thousand pounds for doing an hour’s interview by Skype.’ It was for some group of company presidents.

  ‘That’s not much,’ Julian said.

  ‘Ingratitude.’

  ‘Well,’ Julian said, ‘if Tony Blair – a war criminal – can get one hundred and twenty, I should get at least one pound more than him.’

  ‘You want me to write back to them and say you want more money?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Julian.

  Later, Julian was on the phone trying to instruct Alan Dershowitz – ‘the ultra-Zionist American lawyer’ – to represent WikiLeaks in its fight with the US federal government over its attempt to subpoena the organisation’s Twitter account. ‘It’s good politics to get him,’ Julian said. ‘Even if we lose him later. The middle right-wing faction in America will respond to him fighting on our behalf.’

  I looked in the visitors’ book at Ellingham Hall. Under 29 November 2010, Julian had signed his name and written a message. ‘Today with my friends we tried to bring modern history to the world.’ It was the day after WikiLeaks began publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever released into the public domain. I wanted to get a lot of his childhood stuff down but he spent the night going off his head about the forthcoming edition of Panorama. It seems the reporter John Sweeney had put together ‘a swingeing attack’. Julian flames up when confronted with stuff like this.

  Another afternoon, I was trying to get him to stop his undergraduate lecturing about freedom. I knew there was nothing I could use: it was all standard-grade Voltaire with a smattering of Chomsky. Sarah came in with a couple of FedEx boxes. A few weeks earlier, the billionaire (and Jimmy Choo-associated financier) Matthew Mellon, for whom Julian was a hero, had landed his helicopter in the field outside the house and come in to have lunch. He said it was a pity a CEO such as Julian only really had one suit. Mellon said he would send him some clothes in the post. They’d forgotten about it until the FedEx boxes appeared. ‘Oh my God,’ Sarah said, ‘they’re actually in here.’

  There were two suits by Oswald Boateng, a white shirt from Turnbull & Asser and a couple of ties, both from the gift shop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The suits had bright linings, one pomegranate-coloured, the other aqua. I told Julian that Boateng was the famous black British suit-maker of Savile Row. ‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘It fits the blaxploitation theme I’m hoping for with the film of my life. I want Morgan Freeman to play me.’ He began stripping off and I saw he had a pair of Tesco’s trackie bottoms under his old suit. He donned each suit in turn and asked us to tell him how he looked. He was anxious to know if they fitted properly. ‘Isn’t this one a bit baggy on the arse?’ he asked. I looked at the note Matthew Mellon had sent. ‘Julian: Hope this finds you well. Some Savile Row suits I thought you might find useful. Hopefully there is a Taylar [sic] nearby … All the best to you and the gang.’

  I spoke to Jamie Byng, who made the point that Julian didn’t appear to see how unattractive he could seem. He said the book would fail if we didn’t know how to temper or transform that; if the book didn’t save him from himself and go deeper than his defences. I knew what he meant. I told him I was trying to give Julian a crash course in self-deprecation, and would continue to insist that he not make himself the hero of every anecdote. I told Jamie the work WikiLeaks was trying to do might be bigger than Julian’s ability to articulate it.

  There was this incredible need for spy-talk. Julian would often refer to the places where he lived as ‘safe houses’ and say things like, ‘When you go to Queensland there’s a contact there you should speak to.’

  ‘You mean a friend?’ I’d say.

  ‘No. It’s more complicated than that.’ He appeared to like the notion that he was being pursued and the tendency was only complicated by the fact that there were real pursuers. But the pursuit was never as grave as he wanted it to be. He stuck to his Cold War tropes, where one didn’t deliver a package but made a ‘drop off’. One day, we were due to meet some of the WikiLeaks staff at a farmhouse out towards Lowestoft. We went in my car. Julian was especially edgy that afternoon, feeling perhaps that the walls were closing in, as we bumped down one of those flat roads covered in muck left by tractors’ tyres. ‘Quick, quick,’ he said, ‘go left. We’re being followed!’ I looked in the rear-view mirror and could see a white Mondeo with a wire sticking out the back.

  ‘Don’t be daft, Julian,’ I said. ‘That’s a taxi.’

  ‘No. Listen to me. It’s surveillance. We’re being followed. Quickly go left.’ Just by comical chance, as I was rocking a Sweeney-style handbrake turn, the car behind us suddenly stopped at a farmhouse gate and a little boy jumped out and ran up the path. I looked at the clock as we rolled off in a cloud of dust. It said 3.48.

  ‘That was a kid being delivered home from school,’ I said. ‘You’re mental.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he said.

  *

  There was plenty of laughter at the table in Ellingham Hall, followed by long periods of boredom. The laughter had a lot to do with Sarah, who had a nice way of teasing Julian, and a lot to do with the man himself, who responds well to jokes. It was all part of that discontented winter, when the book kept sliding back on itself. On a good day, it was inspiring to see them go after some lying politician or some corrupt tinpot government. It was exciting to think, in that very Jane Austen kind of house, that no novel had ever captured this new kind of history, where military lies on a global scale were revealed by a bunch of sleepy amateurs two foot from an Aga.

  Eventually, I found a house to rent in Bungay, ten minutes away from Ellingham Hall, a place to work quietly and get away from the general stagnation. I was driving a lot and trying to find a way into the book, but the delaying tactics on Julian’s part had become insane. When I tried to talk to him about dates, he talked about his forthcoming trial hearing and told me Fidel Castro had sent a message to say WikiLeaks was the only website he liked. The 60 Minutes programme went out in America and the response was massive. One commentator said Julian should win the Nobel Peace Prize; another said he had set back the cause of democracy by decades. In the midst of all the kitchen chaos, Julian puffed a cigar and I was reminded, as if I needed reminding, that nobody is simply one thing: history was full of messy characters exercising their rudeness and eating with their hands while changing the world. I tried to keep that in mind as the days passed. ‘In one fell swoop,’ said Foreign Policy, ‘the candour of the cables released by WikiLeaks did more for Arab democracy than decades of backstage US diplomacy.’

  One of the things Julian found it hardest to admit to was the amount of hacking he did himself. He had worked out that being an ‘editor’ was somehow a necessary front for much that he did. He objected to the idea that WikiLeaks ‘stole’ secrets: according to him they simply understood, at a deeply sophisticated level, how the flow of information in society could be altered. Far from being a slave to machines, he doubted their morality, feeling that computers were already being used all over the world to control us, and that only the moral and the wise and the fleet of finger, such as those at WikiLeaks, had the requisite understanding to fight back. In 2011, during the Egyptian uprising, Hosni Mubarak tried to close down the country’s mobile phone network, a service that came through the Canadian
telecoms company Nortel. Julian and his gang gained access to Nortel’s servers and fought against Mubarak’s official hackers to reverse the process. The revolution continued and Julian was satisfied, sitting back in our remote kitchen eating chocolates.

  That is why I didn’t walk out. The story was just too large. What Julian lacked in efficiency or professionalism he made up for in courage. What he lacked in carefulness he made up for in impact. In our overnight conversations, he told me about the mindset of the expert hacker. He described how, as a teenager, he’d wandered through the virtual corridors of NASA, Bank of America, the Melbourne transport system or the Pentagon. At his best, he represented a new way of existing in relation to authority. He wasn’t very straightforwardly of the left and couldn’t have distinguished dialectical materialism from a bag of nuts. He hates systems of belief, hates all systems, wants indeed to be a ghost in the machine, walking through the corridors of power and switching off the lights. I found myself writing notes culled from what he said to me about himself. ‘When you’re a hacker you’re interested in masks within masks,’ and ‘We could undermine corruption from its dead centre. Justice will always in the end be about human beings, but there is a new vanguard of experts, criminalised as we are, who have fastened onto the cancer of modern power, and seen how it spreads in ways that are still hidden from ordinary human experience.’

  But he was also losing touch with promises he had made and contracts he’d signed. His paranoia was losing him support and in a normal organisation, one where other people’s experience was respected and where their value was judged on more than ‘loyalty’, he would have been fired. I would have fired him myself if I hadn’t been there merely to help him put words on his ideas. But his sentences too were infected with his habits of self-regard and truth-manipulation. 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.

  I sat back and watched. The night of Sarah’s birthday there were champagne and jokes, but it ended with Julian and Sarah poring over the WikiLeaks book written by the two Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding, which had been published that day. Sarah would read out the ‘bad bits’, and he would say, ‘It’s disgusting,’ or ‘That’s malicious libel.’ I thought it was all quite lowering, the book’s interest in his sex life and their interest in the book’s interest. ‘It says here you carried abortion pills around with you that were really just sugar pills.’

  Julian: ‘What?’

  Sarah: ‘And that you set out to impregnate girls. It says you said to one of them you would call their baby “Afghanistan”. Well, that does sound like you. I’ve heard you say that sort of thing, about naming babies after your campaigns. But you wouldn’t leave all these girls to have babies on their own, would you?’

  Julian: ‘Sarah.’

  Sarah: ‘I’m just asking. Have you been at the births of all your children?’

  Julian: ‘All except one.’

  But I thought he only had one son? Was he lying to me about his life? He started following Leigh’s Twitter feed and I saw, over his shoulder, many of the replies he was making on WikiLeaks’s behalf. I could see he thought I was bonkers not to think the Guardian a force of evil. ‘You don’t understand the extent of the problem,’ he would say. But I believe I understood it all too well.

  ‘Is this a good use of our time?’ I said it again and again and it had no impact. One of his strategies was to invent, on the spot, new avant-garde styles that the book should adopt. One day he said the book should contain ‘parables’ and he suggested the paragraphs should be numbered, like verses. ‘You’ve got to get yourself and the staff to see the book as a priority,’ I said. ‘A great book will set things right. It will constitute a much bigger thing than turf wars or tweets.’

  ‘But it can’t be the priority,’ Julian said. ‘Ending wars and starting a revolution in Libya is the priority.’

  He started coming to my house in Bungay every day. I’d make lunch, waiting for him to get off the phone or stop ranting about Mark Stephens, his lawyer. Sometimes he was ranting at Stephens, and I have a tape where you can hear each side of the conversation as they talk about money. During those days at the Bungay house I would try to sit him down with a new list of questions, and he’d shy away from them, saying he wasn’t in the mood or there were more pressing matters to deal with. I think he was just keen to get away from Ellingham Hall. I had the internet. 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.

  I wasn’t only struggling to get him to commit to the book, I was struggling to keep the project dark. I didn’t answer any of the calls I received. There was clearly a leak, which is poetic justice I suppose when you’re working with WikiLeaks.

  *

  Julian came up to London for the appeal hearing on Sunday 6 February 2011. At midnight I went over to the house he was staying at in Southwick Mews in Paddington. The house was Vaughan’s office, near the Frontline Club, and was full of office equipment; a large conference room was filled with ‘friends’ of WikiLeaks. I went up to a small bedroom at the top of the house and found Julian lying on an unmade bed. There were clothes on the floor and books about internet amateurs on the nightstand, along with David Remnick’s book on Barack Obama. Julian was cutting his nails. ‘Do you know why I’m doing this, cutting my nails?’ he asked.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘So the court doesn’t look at my nails and think they are the nails of someone who rips condoms’ – one of the Swedish women had alleged that he had ripped off a condom during sex. Like everyone else, the Swedish women were merely figures passing by on the other side of the glass.

  A group of pro-WikiLeaks protesters were lined up outside Belmarsh behind fences and began to cheer when we arrived. Julian was wearing one of the Boateng suits but the effect wasn’t great because he insisted on wearing a grey duffel coat on top. We went upstairs to the consultation room and everybody seemed to be there. The lawyers were headed by Stephens, an ebullient, red-faced mucker straight out of Dickens, saturated in media savvy. He stood among the sureties and supporters: Tony Benn, Jemima Khan, Bianca Jagger, James Fox and Bella Freud, and the five or so young people I associated with WikiLeaks. We were led up to seats in the gallery they’d saved for friends. As soon as I sat and looked down at the court I saw Esther Addley of the Guardian. She saw me and smiled, I smiled back and she lifted her BlackBerry. ‘Tweeting,’ I thought, and, sure enough, within minutes she tweeted that I had come in with the Assange party. ‘Rumoured ghostwriter. Rumour confirmed?’ she wrote.

  Geoffrey Robertson, for Assange, argued that the person in Sweden who issued the warrant, Marianne Ny, was not, as she described herself, the ‘chief prosecutor’, but a minor prosecutor not qualified to do what she did. This seemed weak to me. I also wondered whether Mr Justice Riddle would feel antagonised by Robertson’s seeming upper-class snobbery. Julian sat behind glass in the dock and joked with the guards. Sarah was sitting beside me and pretty much slept for two hours. At lunchtime, I headed home and then reappeared at the mews at midnight. Julian was lying on the bed again, going over the day’s events while Sarah cut his hair with a pair of fairly blunt-looking scissors. He was critical of Robertson’s opening. ‘He failed to go for the heart before going for the head,’ Julian said. ‘And I wasn’t happy with him not using the words “beyond reasonable doubt” enough.’ Sarah opened a box of Ferrero Rocher and we lay on the bed discussing it all. I repeated the phrase I’d used weeks before when I talked to Jamie Byng. ‘I want to give you a crash course in self-deprecation.’ He said he had been far more self-deprecating before the custody battle for his son, which damaged him.

  Sometime in the early hours, he showed me a webpage. I
t said: ‘Assange Kept Touching My Pussy, Says Ex-WikiLeaker’. He was chortling like mad. It was a story from the Domscheit-Berg book Inside WikiLeaks, which told how Assange was always trying to control everything, including Domscheit-Berg’s cat, which, the book alleged, Julian kept strangling in a playful way.

  People turned up out of nowhere. No one introduced them properly, and they didn’t have surnames anyway: they were just Carlos or Tina or Oliver or Thomas. One night in Ellingham Hall, a French guy called Jeremy came in with a sack of encrypted phones. Julian always seemed to have three phones on the go at any one time – the red phone was his personal one – and this latest batch was designed to deal with a general paranoia that newspapers were hacking all of us. It was always like that: sudden bursts of vigilance would vie with complete negligence. There was no real system of security or applied secrecy, not if you’ve read about how spy agencies operate. Julian would speak on open lines when he simply forgot to take care. The others kept the same mobiles for months. And none of them seemed to care about a running tape recorder. Granted, I was there to ask questions and record replies, but still, much of what they said had nothing to do with the book and they simply forgot about it. Only once was I asked to sign a confidentiality agreement, when Julian gave me a hard drive containing very sensitive material, but they forgot I had the drive and never asked for it back.

  He’s not a details guy. None of them is. What they love is the big picture and the general fight. They love the noise and the glamour, the history, the spectacle, but not the fine print. That is why they released so many cables so quickly: for impact. And there’s a good argument to support that. But, even today, years later, the cables have never had the dedicated attention they deserve. They made a splash and then were left languishing. We saw this love of spectacle and lack of detailed thinking more recently, during the 2016 presidential election, where Assange, keen to do anything to express his hatred of Hillary Clinton, allowed his organisation to be aligned with the work of Russian hackers, who were feeding him leaks from the Democratic National Committee. A more thoughtful editor, less narcissistic and not so desperate for a quick impact, would have weighed the ‘gain’ of disgracing Clinton against the danger of helping Trump, and he would have avoided being seen to meddle in the democratic process of a foreign nation and allying himself with Putin’s authoritarian regime. Asssange has no self-control and no sense of basic public relations, and his attempt to bend the American election harmed him in every way it is possible for a ‘freedom-fighting’ journalist to be harmed. Officials at the Ecuadorian embassy, where he lived in conditions of asylum, temporarily cut off his internet access – but to Assange it was all worth it because it allowed him to get back at an old enemy. Perhaps it also allowed him to feel relevant, at a time when many of his former supporters felt his hubris had driven WikiLeaks into the ground. After the release of the diplomatic cables of 2011, I always hoped someone would do a serious editing job, ordering them country by country, contextualising each one, providing a proper introduction, detailing each injustice and each breach, but Julian wanted the next splash and, even more, he wanted to scrap with each critic he found on the internet. As for the book, he kept putting it off.