Wrath of the Wiki fugitive
Lack of sun has given him a heart defect ... He’s not allowed to go to hospital ... And ‘police burn £240k a month on me!’ Indignant and unrepentant, a compelling interview with Julian Assange to mark two years of self-imposed incarceration
WHEN Julian Assange was in solitary confinement in HMP Wandsworth, he was permitted one hour daily of fresh air and proper exercise in the outside world. Since he was granted asylum within the Embassy of Ecuador two years ago yesterday, the WikiLeaks chief has known no such luxury.
One hour is the minimum demanded by the United Nations – after visiting Assange last Monday, I can see the toll exacted by its absence.
His usually pale skin is now almost translucent and on his face it is so puffy it looks as if it is lifting off his naturally sharp cheekbones. He has a chronic cough which the installation of a humidifier to moisten the dry, air-conditioned atmosphere has done little to ease. His eyes have navy pools of shadow beneath them, suggesting that he’s shifted from nocturnal to sleep-deprived.
He has grown a snowy beard. ‘It’s a helpful point of reference for people to acknowledge the passing of time,’ he says, grinning.
Assange is, according to a WikiLeaks source, suffering from the potentially life-threatening heart condition arrhythmia and has a chronic lung complaint and dangerously high blood pressure. A severe shortage of Vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, is impacting on his general health – in the long term, it can trigger asthma and diabetes, weaken bones and increase the risk of dementia.
The Ecuadorians have asked permission to take him to hospital – using a diplomatic car as an ambulance if the need arises – but it’s a request the Foreign Office has declined to answer. In the meantime, he works out with a former SAS veteran who acts as his personal trainer and plays football alone in the embassy corridor in an effort to keep flexible.
Compared to the last time I saw him (at Christmas), he does not look well. Today he’s wearing smart dark jeans, a favourite black and white flannel shirt and – typically Assange – a pair of socks at least one size too small. He’s a restless soul, his feet jiggling and his arms windmilling to make one point or another.
And the point he’d like to make is that he’s angry. He’s angry about the cost of his exile to his health, to his family and to Britain – £7million and counting. He doesn’t like the words ‘self-imposed’, believing he had no option in his battle to avoid extradition to the US where he faced up to 35 years in prison for his controversial whistleblowing activities.
‘Look,’ he says, ‘the broader geopolitics is that the world is going crazy. Maybe it’s time to think that WikiLeaks is not the main problem here for the West, maybe me and my publishing house are a lesser threat than say the Islamic State in Iraq or, closer to home, paedophiles in Westminster.
‘Why are they burning £240,000 a month on me which could be better spent on hospital beds, meals for the needy or teachers’ salaries? The Metropolitan Police Service has now spent in excess of £7 million on guarding the embassy, which is a ridiculous waste of taxpayers’ money.’
I ask him unambiguously what he’d do if the police were removed from their round-the-clock watch.
THERE is officer one guarding the internal front door of the embassy, one on the steps outside and others strategically positioned nearby. It’s difficult to imagine he’d not show British officers a clean pair of heels – although it would have to be some kind of diplomatic flit as the formerly nomadic traveller doesn’t have a passport.
‘The British authorities have it. Apparently it’s lost in a drawer somewhere. And it’s not like I can go into the Australian Consulate to get a replacement.’
But he hasn’t answered the question. He demurs for a moment and says: ‘I would want an understanding – formal or informal – that I would be given time to leave the UK before the US puts in an extradition bid. And then I’d go to my children, like any father.’ He is visibly upset.
‘One of my children is trapped in a war zone,’ he says unexpectedly. ‘They live in a country in which the elected government has collapsed and violence has broken out. I cannot go there. As with any parent, my instinct is to protect but I can do nothing.
‘One of the best things about human beings is that they are adaptable and show strength and configure themselves to cope with bad situations. I can do that, not least because I understand the politics of it all. What I don’t accept is the interference with my family. That is not forgivable. I have managed to protect some of my children, but unfortunately not all of them, from being used, swept up into this situation.
‘I have not seen my mother for two years, nor my grandmother, who is 87. In the time I have been in the embassy, both my stepfather and my grandfather have died. I am a man in my early 40s and most people will understand that means playing a supportive role in an extended family, being the person others rely on instead of worrying about.
‘I am being denied that, and by extension so are they.
‘We miss each other but it’s incredibly difficult to have any kind of relationship with those you love because it puts them in danger of surveillance, of attack. I am extremely protective of them and have done everything possible to avoid their exposure because I cannot have them being used as leverage against me.’
To see Assange now and to read his ‘cypher-punk’ CV – he remains one of most gifted computer hackers of all time – you’d be forgiven for thinking he’s a geek. But he’s not. He grew up on an all-Australian childhood of crab-hunting, fishing, raft-building and ocean swimming. He loves mountains and forests and it’s clear he feels wrenched from the natural world.
‘I can’t even keep a pot plant alive for long in here,’ he says.
All of which underscores the enormity of the decision he made in June 2012 to seek asylum in the embassy, a status that was granted two years ago this weekend.
The United States wants to prosecute him over WikiLeaks’ 2010 publication of an extraordinary cache of classified documents concerning the Pentagon’s activities in Iraq and Afghanistan and US diplomacy elsewhere in the world. Assange is also the subject of a European Arrest Warrant relating to allegations of a sexual misconduct in Sweden four years ago. No charges have been brought in connection with the allegations – which he has steadfastly denied – but prosecutors wish to question him in Stockholm.
What Assange fears is that he could be extradited to America by either the UK or Sweden and that he risks spending most of the rest of his life in jail. He remains optimistic a diplomatic solution will be achieved by the UK and Ecuador which will enable him to seek safe passage to a friendly country. He still believes that will be Ecuador itself. ‘As a nation they have done the hard yards for me and I know it is a safe place.’
Assange describes life in the embassy as ‘sometimes lonely and sometimes peaceful’.
But it’s a life that still attracts a lot of attention. He regularly receives bomb and death threats by post and email but is also targeted by female fans proposing marriage and romance. ‘He puts them all in the bin but he gets offered pretty much everything you could imagine – everything,’ said an embassy insider.
His small bedroom, to the rear of the embassy, is his sanctuary. He has a private shower room, use of the tiny galley kitchen which serves the embassy staff and office space which shifts from room to room for security reasons.
It is cluttered with computer equipment, tiny cups of South American coffee and correspondence, including a letter from the Select Committee on Extradition Law asking him for a submission as to whether the UK’s extradition system breaches fundamental human rights. ‘It’ll have to be a written one,’ he deadpans.
‘I cook for myself most days, ordinary things like lasagne and curry. I roast vegetables and long to be able to make a proper Sunday lunch but the kitchen is not quite big enough. When I am alone, when everyone else has gone home except the guard on the front desk, I practise my football skills up and down the long corridor. I don’t have much time but also enjoy watching some TV series.’
His current favourite is The Honourable Woman which, with its complex plot centred on politics and national security surveillance, he evidently finds familiar.
Its star, Maggie Gyllenhaal, visited him with her husband Peter Sarsgaard while filming it in London last year, but ‘I’m watching it one episode a week on BBC2 like everyone else – there are no perks there’.
The Honourable Woman and Series 9 of the counter-terrorism cult thriller 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland, both reference WikiLeaks’ work. ‘It’s a compliment to us to be considered enough of an element in the world that Fox TV, which makes 24, would use us as a serious plot device… even if it is about i nsane anarchist ambition which would lead to Armageddon!’ He’s making a joke about the reach of WikiLeaks, which remains an organisation that divides public opinion. It’s either a force which holds governments and corporations to account or a publishing house guilty of harming the national security of Western nations.
It’s this latter belief which is preventing Assange from being permitted to leave the embassy to receive hospital attention.
‘He would come round hand- cuffed to his hospital bed,’ one source told me.
He is represented in his fight to retain his freedom by human rights barrister Amal Alamuddin, who recently became engaged to George Clooney. She spent two-and-a-half hours with him last week but she may have to accept that her fiance’s political ambitions – there is speculation Clooney will run for the governorship of California and perhaps even the White House – will become incompatible with defending a man considered by some US politicians to be an enemy of America.
When I first met Assange, he was just 100 days into his embassy exile and believed it could be as little as three months until the case in Sweden was dropped, solving at least one of his and his glamorous barrister’s problems. But amid the timeless marble and mahogany fittings of his surroundings, almost 700 days have gone by.
ASSANGE is not free to so much as step outside, but he is free to work. ‘I remain the CEO of a small multinational publishing house which goes toe to toe with the White House, the Pentagon and the national security services,’ he says with pride.
‘I said when I got out of prison I had enough anger to last me 100 years and 100 years are not passed yet – but that anger also acts as useful fuel to get work done.’
He has refused to let the difficulties of the past two years derail WikiLeaks’ continuing publication of secret and controversial material from around the world. He has also written a book about Google which will be in bookshops next month and is working on another about geopolitics for 2015. A documentary he co-produced this year about human rights abuses in El Salvador was nominated for a prize at the HotDocs International Film Festival.
Assange remains inspired by his work but it’s clear he is ailing and that the political and media momentum of those early days which kept his spirits soaring, has faltered. The task he set himself of building a manageable new life in the embassy has achieved a suffocating status quo and diplomacy is deadlocked.
‘However,’ he reflects, ‘my stubbornness is my best and my worst quality. I won’t give up.’