The Secret Life

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘Did Julian ever get those emails to you,’ Caroline asked, ‘the ones about the setting up of WikiLeaks?’

  ‘No,’ I said. He never located any material. Just like he never located the marked-up manuscript. ‘And what would be the point in having them? He doesn’t want a book.’

  ‘But he does want a book. Every time I speak to him he says: “I want a book.”’

  ‘And what does that mean, “I want a book”? He wants a book by not allowing it to be written? By not doing the work? By not committing himself to the interviews or liking what emerges from them? In what sense does he want a book?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He doesn’t want a book. And all basis for a collaboration as defined by this contract is over.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Jamie said. ‘You’ve already explained to him we expect the money paid back in full. And the same for Knopf. And sadly the contracts are cancelled.’

  ‘He prefers to say “suspended”.’

  ‘No,’ said Derek. ‘You have to be clear. This is not suspended and it is not postponed. It is cancelled.’

  ‘But he says he wants to continue working with Andy,’ Caroline said. There was a pause in which she and I exchanged long glances. I think she wanted me to save the day somehow. ‘It’s just so frustrating,’ she added, ‘because there’s a very good book waiting there.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But he can’t handle it.’

  ‘Mark Stephens thinks he’s having a nervous breakdown.’

  ‘That’s possible, too,’ I said.

  *

  One of the issues that bugged me was how far all this had taken us from the work WikiLeaks had started out doing. I believed at this stage that the organisation could regroup after the legal appeals and the autobiography battle, returning to the core work that had made Julian’s name. But there was strong evidence now that he was devoted to his legal problems as well as to skirmishes with former collaborators over his reputation. The issue of Bradley Manning’s court martial was very much on his mind but he didn’t seem able to lead the charge in defending Manning, and for a good reason: it remained important to him to pretend not to know Manning was the source for the Apache helicopter video, the cables and the Afghan war logs that had justified WikiLeaks’s presence as a new moral force in the world. I remained sure that the real research on the cables hadn’t been done, that the implications of so much military and diplomatic plotting, though they could change the map, hadn’t been looked into. I thought, if Julian was serious and strategic, that WikiLeaks should not only bale stuff out onto the web, but should then facilitate the editing and presenting of that work in a way that was of permanent historical value. Perry Anderson of Verso Books had the same thought, and I put it to Julian that the WikiLeaks Map of the World should be a series that provided for a proper academic study of what the biggest security leaks in history had revealed, with expert commentary, notes, essays and introductions. It would provide the organisation with a lasting, grown-up legacy, a powerful, orderly continuation of its initial work.

  Julian came to lunch at my flat in Belsize Park. Tariq Ali came too, and so did Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review of Books, as well as an American editor for Verso called Tom Mertes. Anderson’s idea was that Verso would publish a series of books, or one book in which each chapter showed how the US cables released by WikiLeaks had changed the political position of a particular country. A writer who knew Italy, say, would introduce the chapter and the same would be done for every country and it would be very meticulous and well made. Julian gave a big speech at the beginning, the middle and the end. He clearly liked Tariq but had no sense of him as someone who knew a lot more about the world than he did. Although the idea for the book had come from Verso, Julian preferred to give a lecture about how most academics were corrupted by their institutions.

  During the lunch I asked Julian if he had done anything about Canongate. He said everything was fine over there. ‘Not so,’ I said. ‘The problem isn’t going to go away. You owe them half a million pounds.’ He wanted a cigar and I found him one. ‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. Anyone else would have jumped at the chance of the Verso project but as Julian drove off in a taxi I knew he would never call Tariq about this or lay any of the groundwork they’d agreed. Julian was already more concerned about claiming the idea for himself, an idea that he would never see to fruition. The meeting had called for responsible action, when what Julian loved was irresponsible reaction. Half a decade later, a much less ambitious book would appear from Verso, a single volume, good in itself but, for me, a reminder of the copious ill application that was obvious throughout my time with Assange, and which flowed with the wine and the monologuing at that lunch in Belsize Park.

  An invitation arrived for his fortieth birthday. ‘Come and celebrate with the “Most Dangerous Man in the World”’, it said. In London, there had been a touch of the old radical chic-ery when people heard there was to be a party. A film director, a therapist, a writer, left messages on my voicemail asking if I was going to the ‘big party’. When it came to the day I brought a friend full of curiosity and we arrived at Ellingham Hall to find the kind of tent that is popular at your average big fat gypsy wedding. Julian’s dad was there, and I spoke to him, not gleaning anything, just capturing the sense of this rather proud and gentle man. The party was curiously unfestive, somehow, like one of those family occasions where nobody has really thought about the music or the fact that the kids will want different things from the adults. There was a lame auction of stuff Julian had in prison, too egotistical I thought, and, again, a little off-key. Vivienne Westwood was waving her arms around and bidding. Jennifer Robinson, the lawyer who assisted Mark Stephens, and I had a brief chat and she was literally rolling her eyes about what had transpired. ‘We need to talk,’ she said. ‘What’s happening? The whole thing is running out of control.’ From the next table, Jemima Khan crooked her hand in the way that means ‘call me’.

  *

  At the end of July 2011, Canongate told me they intended to publish the first draft of the book without Julian’s say-so, and with an unsigned foreword by Nick Davies, the editor, outlining the reasons it was being published despite being incomplete and not having Julian’s authorisation. As far as I was concerned it felt right neither to help them with the book nor to hinder their efforts to get their money back. The dispute was between Julian and the people whose contract he signed.

  On 7 August Nick from Canongate came to the flat I was staying at in Glasgow (I had a play in rehearsal) from his office in Edinburgh. He was worried about his foreword and about the manuscript more generally, and I agreed to look at it with a view to protecting each side from warfare. Nick’s foreword made every attempt to be decent, stating clearly how Canongate felt the book met their intentions and the letter of the contract, but making clear it was not being published with Julian’s authorisation. I made several suggestions. I advised him to admit that the book was too personal for Julian, which is what Julian had said to me, so as to pre-empt suggestions that his objections were political.

  I flipped through the manuscript and advised Nick also to remove the names of the Guardian journalists David Leigh and Nick Davies. It wasn’t at all clear whether Julian was being fair to them and I felt the parties might be litigious. Both Leigh and Davies had sent me emails saying they would sue if the book libelled them, and I felt that Jamie, despite being generally gung-ho, should not land himself in a legal mess. The editor agreed to make these changes. We didn’t discuss the Swedish chapter, containing Julian’s counter-story of the rape allegations, but I reckoned they might have to come back to it. The case was still pending.

  Caroline Michel phoned. She said Jamie would not return her calls. Julian now ‘wanted to talk’, and later he would settle on this unwillingness of theirs, ignoring the fact that all the unwillingness had been his for four months. How far was he willing to go in order to fuck everybody off? The answer came on 1 September. Ha
ving canvassed his followers on Twitter, Julian decided to dump the whole cache of 250,000 US cables supplied to him by Bradley Manning on the internet. He blamed the Guardian – a tactic I recognise from many of his sorties – and especially David Leigh. He insisted Leigh had included a password in his book that could decrypt the files WikiLeaks had left online. Leigh has always said this is nonsense. The manoeuvre brought so many infamous Julian tropes together: the hatred of the US; the showing off about security while having no real sense of how it works (why were the files left online?); the ‘blame culture’ in which any enemy of his must be shown to have failed. By then, Leigh’s book had been out for seven months, and not once during that time – nor during his dozens of interviews with me – had Julian mentioned that the book might contain the password. Not once did he refer to it or try to put it right. He either ignored it, as he does so many pressing issues, because he can’t be bothered, is not diligent, thinks things will go away just because he wants them to, or – my personal belief – he never read Leigh’s book, only excerpts fed to him by his colleagues or the web. This would be unforgivable in any company member or security group, never mind one dealing in hundreds of thousands of secrets. But Julian is unsackable, and, like the unsackable all over the world, he makes decisions with the kind of hubris that trumps clear-sightedness and experience. There was no point in dumping those cables. By doing so, he risked exposing people mentioned in them. (No privacy is necessary, according to Julian, but he’s wrong about that.) After he released all the cables, many of his allies turned against him. He had ruined the last of his reputation as a responsible publisher, just to get one over on the Guardian. I hung my head when I learned what he’d done, feeling it spelled long-term disaster for him.

  I was getting a lot of calls asking me to speak about all this, but I didn’t answer them. I’d failed not only to get the fascinating book I imagined, but to keep my involvement helpfully dark. The emails kept coming about doing a tell-all; they appeared to come from everywhere and I froze. It wasn’t just the usual reluctance to write too much, it was a sense of loyalty to my original idea of ghosting. Plus a kind of loyalty to Julian’s vulnerability, especially (not in spite of) his role as enemy to himself. I just couldn’t stand the scale of the errors he was making and didn’t want to describe them. Not then. I knew it would take years and it has.

  Jamie called to inform me they were about to tell Julian the book was going to be published. Canongate wanted to face down an attempted injunction before they printed the book, not after. According to their lawyers, Julian had breached the contract, and if he injuncted they would fight for the right to publish. On 7 September 2011, a letter was sent to Assange telling him ‘that we will be publishing your autobiography this month and the book will be going to press on the 19th September … It will lack your formal imprimatur and you are entitled to distance yourself from our publication. However, in proceeding with publication under our original contract with you, the book will carry your copyright and we will honour your royalty payments once our costs have been recovered.’

  Julian called me in Glasgow and I spoke to him in a lane off Renfield Street. It was hard to hear what he was saying, but he was ranting against Canongate and saying he would seek an injunction. I already knew from Caroline Michel that he and WikiLeaks were in financial trouble and that he could not afford this – in the UK you have to prove to the judge that you can afford the costs if you lose. ‘But you’ve had the manuscript since April,’ I said, ‘and you did nothing about it.’

  ‘No. I’ve been trying to contact Jamie for weeks,’ he said. ‘And he wouldn’t return the calls. He’s obviously been planning this since early in the summer.’

  Lawyers’ letters were exchanged.

  I tried to convince Julian that legal steps would not work. It might be better to get hold of the book and make any crucial changes before it was too late. I said I could help him do this – to ensure that he was less vulnerable to attack or prosecution. I told him I had already redacted the names of the journalists who had been identified by him but whose side of the story Julian hadn’t accounted for. We agreed on two areas where the manuscript might endanger him: first, on the issue of Manning. He insisted ‘alleged source’ be placed before Manning’s name and I said I would pass that on. And, second, the whole Swedish chapter would have to be looked at with a view to protecting his case there. ‘Spend the next day or two looking through the manuscript making amendments,’ I said. ‘And give them to me, and I’ll force Canongate to make the changes. It’s your best course of action.’

  ‘We might try both. We might try this method and an injunction,’ he said. But I knew this would require more effort than he was ever going to put in. His default position was to let the whole thing run out of control and then get into a Twitter war with the parties afterwards.

  ‘If you don’t do this marking,’ I said, ‘and if you disappear into your bubble, there is nothing we can do to fix this. They will publish the book as it is.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I agree.’ He then did nothing and made no marks to the manuscript.

  I eventually told Jamie he should be ready to make some changes and it would then be possible to get Julian onside. ‘That should be fine,’ he said.

  Julian asked me if I could get the Swedish chapter of the book sent to Helena Kennedy, who was by now advising him on a number of legal issues. I said I would try and I asked Caroline to put pressure on Jamie. I also asked Jamie. He said he thought that would be fine. But Jamie was keen to protect his publication and the rights of those to whom he had sold it. Understandably, he wouldn’t put up with further delays and wouldn’t pass on the manuscript unless Julian agreed to sign a letter saying he wouldn’t oppose the book. Julian was resisting this and preparing for war. I called Jamie: ‘You don’t want his changes, do you?’

  ‘At this stage I don’t trust him to make them.’

  ‘That’s fair enough. You won’t have a book before Christmas. But I can see you wouldn’t be convinced by anybody, not Leo Tolstoy himself, to delay the book.’

  ‘No, we couldn’t. It’s gone too far and he’s had too many chances. We’re publishing the book and this is the book we want to publish.’

  Geoffrey Robertson was then hired by Julian to check the book, completely missing the point that Canongate were about to push the button. There wasn’t time.

  On 19 September Canongate set the presses rolling. ‘We’re proud of the book and he left us no choice but to publish,’ Jamie said. Caroline was engaged in a last-minute effort to stop publication but even at this crucial stage, her client was barely returning her calls.

  Word was leaking out. Before I went to bed I saw messages on my phone from Nick Cohen at the Observer and several from the Scotsman. There was a text from Esther Addley of the Guardian. Jamie said someone at Waterstone’s had phoned the Guardian to say they had a copy of the book. The Independent put a story online. Jamie had arranged for them – and the BBC’s Today programme – to have an exclusive the next morning, with the paper running two extracts naming me as the writer and suggesting I’d bowed out of the project after feeling ‘uncomfortable’ with the way things were going. I immediately turned my phone off.

  The National Theatre of Scotland’s adaptation of my book The Missing had opened in Glasgow that week. After the curtain one night, Jamie met me in the theatre bar. He said he wanted me to get the first copy of the book. Holding it, I realised I felt nothing. I didn’t feel it was by me, and the ghost’s prerogative, to live a half-life in a house that wasn’t mine, was all I had.

  ‘We should seek maximum publicity and maximum debunking,’ Julian said the next day, ‘and I think both things can be done at the same time.’

  ‘How?’ I said.

  ‘By making as much publicity as possible, the book will sell. This is good. And by showing that the publishers jumped early, when we were working on a first draft, we can question the book’s authority. We will choose five inaccuracies in
the book and thereby invalidate its integrity. We will say you oppose the book …’

  ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I’m not comfortable with that. I am not willing to be a pawn in this. The book was at an early stage and you didn’t make changes. This is a matter between you and them and it won’t work to tell people I simply disapprove. It is not of any account whether I approve or not. I did my work, and Canongate will say, rightly, that you did not.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. Readers won’t care about that. The thing to communicate is that we were on a journey that was interrupted.’ He said he was writing a press release and would send it to me. An email came via the London Review of Books, from the Wall Street Journal, asking me to speak about what had happened. The Sunday Times Magazine left a message to say I could have the cover to say whatever I wanted to say. During the evening, Julian, through his Twitter account, sent a bizarre message about truth being stranger than fiction, linking his followers to the book’s Amazon page. Later that night he sent a ‘statement’ – i.e. a rant – to the Associated Press. Jamie Byng was staying in the spare room of the Glasgow flat and I could hear him up in the night responding to texts and messages. In the morning, he told me he had been seeking the advice of Liz Sich at Colman Getty, the PR firm. He was white with rage about the allegations of misconduct directed at him by Julian in his statement.

  I have learned today through an article in the Independent that my publisher, Canongate, has secretly distributed an unauthorised 70,000-word first draft of what was going to be my autobiography … I am not ‘the writer’ of this book. I own the copyright of the manuscript, which was written by Andrew O’Hagan. By publishing this draft against my wishes Canongate has acted in breach of contract, in breach of confidence, in breach of my creative rights and in breach of personal assurances … This book was meant to be about my life’s struggle for justice through access to knowledge. It has turned into something else. The events surrounding its unauthorised publication by Canongate are not about freedom of information – they are about old-fashioned opportunism and duplicity – screwing people over to make a buck.