He’s not a
details guy. None of those around him 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, three
years later, the cables have never had the dedicated attention they deserve.
They made a splash and then were left languishing. 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 autobiography, he kept
putting it off.
I remained
sure that the real research on the cables leaked by Bradley Manning hadn’t been
done, that the implications of so much military and diplomatic plotting though
it 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 which 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 and so did Mary-Kay
Wilmers, the editor of the London Review, 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, say, Italy, 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.
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.
And here’s
the hard bit. Those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the
United Kingdom under Thatcher and Blair, those of us who lived through the
Troubles and the Falklands War, the miners’ strike, the deregulation of the
City, and Iraq, believed that exposing secret deals and covert operations would
prove a godsend. When WikiLeaks began this process in 2010, it felt, to me
anyhow, but also to many others that this might turn out to be the greatest
contribution to democracy since the end of the Cold War. A new kind of openness
suddenly looked possible: technology might allow people to watch their
watchers, at last, and to inspect the secrets being kept, supposedly in our
name, and to expose fraud and exploitation wherever it was encountered in the
new media age. It wasn’t a subtle plan but it smacked of the kind of idealism
that many of us hadn’t felt for a while in British life, where big moral
programmes on the left are thin on the ground. Assange looked like a
counter-warrior and a man not made for the deathly compromises of party
politics. And he seemed deeply connected to the web’s powers of surveillance
and counter-surveillance. What happened, though, is that big government
opposition to WikiLeaks’s work – which continues – became confused, not least
in Assange’s mind, with the rape accusations against him. It has been a fatal
conflation. There’s a distinct lack of clarity in Julian’s approach, a lack
that is, I’m afraid, only reinforced by the people he has working with him.
Only today, he sent me an email – hearing I was writing this piece – telling me
it was illegal for me to speak out without what he called ‘appropriate
consultation’ with him. He wrote of his precarious situation and of the FBI
investigation into his activities. ‘I have been detained,’ he said, ‘without
charge, for 1000 days.’ And there it is, the old conflation, implying that his
detention is to do with his work against secret-keepers in America. It is not.
He was detained at Ellingham Hall while appealing against a request to
extradite him to Sweden to answer questions relating to two rape allegations. A
man who conflates such truths loses his moral authority right there: I tried to
spell this out to him while writing the book, but he wouldn’t listen, sometimes
suggesting I was naive not to consider the rape allegations to have been a
‘honey trap’ set by dark foreign forces, or that the Swedes were merely keen to
extradite him to America. Because he has no ability to see through other
people’s eyes he can’t see how dishonest this conflation seems even to
supporters such as me. It was a trap he built for himself when he refused to go
to Sweden and instead went into the embassy of a nation not famous for its
respect for freedom of speech. He will always have an answer to these points.
But there is no real answer. He made a massive tactical error in not going to
Sweden to clear his name.
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