ON August 20, 2010, Swedish prosecutors charged Julian Assange with two counts of attempted rape.
I was on vacation with my wife and our son. For two weeks we were traveling around Iceland, a country that looks like a photographic negative because the sand in lots of places is black while the frozen fjords are white. We were driving in a rental car from one village to the next, taking our time. I hadn’t done anything as nice as this for years. Some days, I even managed not to think about Julian or WL for a couple of hours.
But of course, what would my life be without WL? I was repeatedly drawn to my laptop. In the car, there was a WLAN router with a UMTS mobile-phone connection, and I had a long power cord for our tent. International journalists were regularly calling me on my Icelandic cell phone.
Harvey Cashore from Canadian TV, for instance, insisted on meeting me in person. Cashore was in charge of investigative research for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). He was in Germany and decided to come to Iceland. We met in Isafjördur, where I had stopped on my tour with Anke and Jacob.
Cashore suggested we team up. The CBC wanted to be involved in our next publication and was prepared to put several editors at our disposal to help us process the material. I spoke with him for two hours in a fish restaurant. His efforts went unrewarded. Our other media partners refused to give the CBC a slice of the cake. The people from Der Spiegel were relaxed about the idea, but our English-language partners flat-out refused. Julian told me they had ratcheted up the pressure.
The German news was dominated by the catastrophe at the Love Parade on July 24 in Duisburg. Nineteen people died in a stampede at the overcrowded techno festival. Two others would succumb to their injuries a few days later.
Shortly thereafter, we began receiving a number of papers connected with the Love Parade: confidential planning documents, internal agreements, and a host of details concerning security arrangements and the permit process. It seemed as though, overnight, half of Duisburg’s municipal government had gotten in touch with their inner whistle-blower.
Blogs and other media had already published some of this material, but we were definitely the first to receive such comprehensive documentation on the background of the tragedy. I felt compelled to publish the material, especially as WL had become the platform where such documents were sure to attract the proper public attention. I spent one night of my Icelandic vacation preparing everything and making sure it was fit for the website.
We had stopped in a small village named Hólmavik, which basically consisted of a museum on witchcraft and a small, ramshackle guesthouse on the side of a hill. We spent a couple of nights there. One of those nights I stayed up with Anke until five in the morning, working on the Duisburg material in the small common area that served as the breakfast room. There was a pile of beer cans next to me from previous guests, and I was wearing dark-blue merino-wool long johns and thick socks against the cold. The only thing that helped combat the painfully slow Internet connection was patience. I had to go through some forty documents and restart the entire chain of production, which was scheduled for revision but which had been neglected because the completion of our most recent publication had consumed such immense resources. One task was to read through all the documents and sort out which were different versions of the same thing. I also had to write summaries and create publishable documents with cover letters. Since our “strike” we had only published bigger leaks on specially dedicated websites—this was to be our first normal publication since resuming operations.
The Love Parade documents went online on August 20. Although it had originally been something of an ironclad principle, by this point we were no longer publishing material in the order in which it arrived. We concentrated on the really big stuff. Julian had issued orders to that effect and had refused to yield despite heated discussions about whether this was right, and despite the fact that, in my eyes, a lot of important material was being ignored.
For example, we possessed the e-mail correspondence over the past four years of the far-right German political party NPD. I had given a journalist a selection of the material so that he could get a first impression, and Der Spiegel, which was also apparently in possession of at least some of the documents, had already written an article. The original version of the piece had cited some of the e-mails, and the party had succeeded in getting a temporary injunction against the magazine. The injunction was later rescinded, but publishing the material would have been good for us. It would have underscored our advantages vis-à-vis traditional media. Injunctions were of no use against WL since there was no official recipient.
When we returned to Reykjavík the following Friday, I logged on to the chat room and discovered what seemed to be a problem. One of the techies, who had also gone on vacation, had disappeared. He’d been gone for nine days even though he had originally said he would only be away for three. We regularly checked to see that our people arrived safely at appointments and that no one had been detained at borders or had gone missing. We were worried.
During our tour of Iceland, we had slept in different beds almost every night, and before our son went to sleep, my wife would tell him that whatever he dreamed of would come true. I don’t know whether this made much of an impression on Jacob, but it sure did on me. That night I dreamed that our colleague had returned home safe and sound from an adventure, and the next morning I awoke convinced that everything would be all right.
And indeed, when I logged on to the chat room, our friend was back. But the good news was followed by a massive blow. Twenty minutes later, when I entered “WikiLeaks” into Google News, I learned that a warrant for Julian’s arrest had been issued in Sweden. He was alleged to have raped two women.
Normally, Swedish law protects people who are the subject of investigations. To avoid damaging their reputations, the media aren’t even allowed to publish the ages, let alone the names, of suspects. But in this case, the Swedish tabloid Expressen, which, like the publishers of some editions of this book, is part of Sweden’s Bonnier Group, had broken all the rules. The paper had written a story based on the prosecutor’s initial investigations and published it with all the names and details. Julian was caught completely unaware. He hadn’t even been formally summoned by the police. The first he’d heard about the accusations was from Expressen. You wouldn’t wish something like that on your worst enemy.
What was strange was that suddenly, for the first time in months, I felt as though Julian was listening to me again. At least when the news first broke. He needed my advice. He needed to hear from everyone that they were on his side. We later advised him to step back from the spotlight for a while. At the same time, we confirmed that we were completely behind him and saw no reason to doubt his version of events.
I was back in Reykjavík with Anke and Jacob to take in the city’s annual cultural festival after enjoying the isolation of the Icelandic countryside. It was Saturday, and the streets were full of people. Stands had been set up everywhere; there was food, drink, and music; and the Reykjavík Marathon was taking place on some of the city’s major avenues. In front of the old jailhouse, Birgitta was reading some of her poetry and collecting signatures supporting an environmental campaigner. I left Anke and Jacob behind at a group of stands and fought my way through the Hallgrímskirkja, a Protestant church that vaguely resembles a launch-ready Ariane space rocket. I had agreed to meet Ingi and Kristinn there to discuss our current problem.
The two Icelanders were waiting for me next to the statue of Leif Ericsson. Kristinn had a habit of looking through people, as though he had seen something frightening in his past and decided to avoid direct eye contact. Ingi stood a bit to the rear, his hands folded in front of his chest. He was wearing olive-green or khaki-colored pants and a vest and was carrying a well-worn messenger bag.
We walked for a while and went into the Einar Jónsson Museum. We weren’t interested in the sculptures there, but we kept walking as we talked, tracing a path of curves and loops
: up a flight of stairs and down again on the other side, around a set of revolving doors to the right, in a figure eight through the room on the left and then back up the stairs to the second floor. A back door led us out into the sculpture garden. If anyone had been tailing us, we would have tired him out, if not shaken him off.
We paused for a moment between the bronze figures. Kristinn was chain-smoking and overarticulated his words. He kept interrupting me. He had spent considerable time with Julian in Great Britain and could count himself among Julian’s most intimate associates.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
Kristinn looked right through me. Ingi observed us, saying nothing. It was clear to me that our crisis-management strategy was somewhere between nonexistent and miserable, and that we all desperately needed to get together as a group and have a fundamental rethink about roles, tasks, and structures. There was no way we could solve our problems in the chat room. I had been pleading for such a core meeting for quite some time. Birgitta joined the three of us a bit later. She, too, seemed at a loss about how to handle our current situation.
Then Kristinn’s cell phone rang. He listened for a while, then answered gleefully and informed us that the warrant had been temporarily suspended. What a day!
Nonetheless, I still thought Julian should rethink his behavior toward his female acquaintances.
There are indeed a few things to be said on the topic of Julian and women. Julian liked women, that’s crystal clear. But there was no one woman with whom he was preoccupied—he liked the idea of women in general. Whenever we attended conferences, he would often scope out the scene. He wasn’t particularly interested in legs, breasts, or asses like the stereotypical man. Julian’s attraction to women wasn’t as predictable as it was portrayed in the media. Julian had an eye for details—wrists, shoulders, or necks, for example. He never said anything like “Great tits.” He would say things along the lines of “That woman has amazing cheekbones—she looks very aristocratic.” Once we noticed an extremely graceful woman searching through her handbag as she passed, and Julian said, “It must feel nice to be touched by those hands.” That was as far as he went. He never said anything obscene to me about women.
I must admit that his fascination with women was contagious, even though I was already spoken for. I remember at the Global Voices Summit in Budapest, we attended a party after our lecture. It took place on the roof of a former supermarket, and we ended up drinking a lot of absinthe. Julian and I normally weren’t big drinkers, but we were in a pretty jolly mood as we made our way from the party back to our apartment.
The apartment had a small gas leak, probably from a faulty pipe, and smelled terrible. We took turns sleeping in the bunk bed and on the sofa. We joked about the smell of gas: “If you hear me taking my last gasp in my sleep, get to the window.” Or “Do you have any final words for your parents when I break the sad news?” But the apartment was cheap and centrally located. Life was actually pretty good in Budapest.
On our way back home from our absinthe evening, we both saw what amounted to an apparition. A woman in hot pants and a tight top whizzed past us on Rollerblades. We continued talking about the conference, other people we knew, and our future plans, but every once in a while, one of us would sigh and say, “What a woman!” Or “Boy, was she the business!” Later, we repeatedly came back to the woman on Rollerblades. She became something of a symbol for our ideal woman.
I never slept around during my time with WL, but I was still plagued by a bad conscience. I noticed that all the travel had put distance between me and my girlfriend in Wiesbaden.
For Julian the criterion that made a woman desirable in his eyes was very simple: twenty-two. She was supposed to be young. And it went without saying that she couldn’t question him. “She has to be aware of her role as a woman,” he used to say. She was also allowed to be intelligent—Julian liked that.
I never noticed him going for any one particular type. It didn’t matter whether a woman was thin or fat, big or small, blond or brunette. It was fine if she was good-looking, but that wasn’t the be-all and end-all. At least, that’s the way he seemed to me when we attended conferences together.
For a time I thought that something might be beginning to develop between him and Birgitta. Birgitta was anything but submissive. She was a straight-ahead sort of woman who spoke her mind. She’s unquestionably attractive, but she’s a long way from being twenty-two. At some point, Julian said to me that she was his dream woman. But maybe he just said that because he often felt the need to say something drastically significant. My sense was that he would never be able to accept a woman who was truly his equal.
We often discussed the theory of evolution. If he did have faith in anything, it was the theory of evolution. Julian thought that the stronger members of the species not only prevailed, but produced heirs who were better able to survive. Naturally, in his view, his genes particularly deserved to be reproduced.
Once I sat in a large group and listened to Julian boast about how many children he had fathered in various parts of the world. He seemed to enjoy the idea of lots and lots of little Julians, one on every continent. Whether he took care of any of these alleged children, or whether they existed at all, was another question.
But Julian could also be very forthcoming with women. When he met a woman, he was polite and charming. He never paid her too much attention, though, and that seemed to keep her coming back for more. His lack of interest was attractive.
• • •
In any case, Julian’s alleged refusal to wear condoms was a basis of the accusations against him in Sweden. Anna A., one of the women who prompted the investigations, is a member of that country’s Association of Christian Social Democrats. She had invited Julian to a seminar in Stockholm on the role of the media in conflict situations. What really happened between them is known only to the women in question and Julian.
The main thing for me was that the accusations existed, and Julian’s position at WL required us to take an official stance toward them. An international warrant for the arrest of a leader of an organization damages the reputation of the project he represents. What one does about it is another issue. The only thing I and others asked him to do was step back from the spotlight a bit. He, on the other hand, began to blame the whole thing on a smear campaign by the Pentagon. He said he had been warned, not long before the accusations, that dirty tricks would be used against him, and that he should be careful not to fall into a sex trap. He refused to tell us which of his contacts had warned him, but he assured us his sources were reliable.
We discussed the issue in the chat room:
J: they will go away be the end of the week
D: no, they wont
D: what will happen given that nothing happens, is that more people will come out of the closet
D: because people do not like the way this is being dealt with
D: its pretty dead simple
D: they want to see this has a consequence
D: and given the statements you made, plus the fact that we are even trying to push this while setup-angle, this is not what is expected
D: whole*
D: this is all not what will make people that feel hurt or whatever go away, in contrary so
D: the reaction to it triggers people to come out of the closet
J: that’s the line you’re trying to push around?
D: what line?
J: if so, i will destroy you.
D: lol
D: wtf [what the fuck] j
D: seriously
D: whats that bullshit?
D: are you out of your fuckin mind?
D: i am not taking this bs much longer j
D: seriously
D: you are shooting a messenger here, and this is not acceptible
D: the one that faces serious problems is you
D: and by that the project might be harmed
D: and thats my concern
D: my interest in he
lping you does not really thrive the way you are dealing with this
D: cant even believe this
D: have you ever, just once, in all this hybris you seem trapped in considered that not everything is someone elses fault?
D: good luck man, i am tired of doing damage control for you there
D: so take a pick
J: Go away and think about your actions and statements. I know of many you do not think I do. I will not tolerate disloyalty in crisis.
D: i think you misunderstand the situation here j
D: quite frankly
D: but as i said, i will not cover for you anymore or do any further damage control
D: good luck with your attitude
D: i for myself have nothing i need to be ashamed for
J: So be it
How was I supposed to make it clear that I was only concerned about the project? In his eyes, we had all fallen for the smear campaign and were now betraying him.
He had told me about the two women. He denied having slept with them without a condom. When asked about the details of the accusations, he remained vague. I have no desire to pass judgment on the women, or on Julian’s conduct. Above all, what apparently sealed his fate in this case was the fact that a sexist guy like him had come together with a pair of emancipated women in a country with stricter judicial standards concerning sexual conduct than most other nations. His pop status, among other things, had gotten him into a situation that was beyond his control.
The question arose of who should pay Julian’s legal costs. It wasn’t right for him to simply use money from funds donated to WikiLeaks. The accusations were a private matter. I wouldn’t have objected if he had submitted a bill for his past year’s work to the foundation or whomever. That would have given him enough money for his attorney, and everything would have been aboveboard. I tried on a number of occasions in the chat room to suggest this as an option. But Julian refused to consider it.
Inside WikiLeaks Page 18