Julian Assange unmasked

On the ground floor of this prime mansion block 50ft from Harrods, word is that the Middle Eastern royal family upstairs are moving out. Developers – possibly the Candy brothers – are moving in. Julian Assange, on the other hand, is staying put.

To get into the embassy you ring on the doorbell next to the lift. Inside you surrender your passport and phone, and wait. On the left are diplomats’ offices. To the right, a short corridor leads to Assange’s room, crammed with desk, treadmill and kitchenette. He sleeps in a converted ladies’ loo next door. There is an open-air light well at the back of the building, which Ecuador’s embassy shares at ground floor level with Colombia’s, but Assange isn’t allowed there. His room has a window, but the glass is frosted. If the embassy had an underground car park it might have been able to spirit Assange out years ago in a diplomatic car, to Heathrow and beyond. But it doesn’t.

His assistant, Joseph, in skinny jeans and heavy glasses, says Julian will be along in a minute. I’ve been told Assange has put on a lot of weight and has a personal hygiene problem. I’ve read accounts of “mad unprofessionalism” and thin-skinned narcissism, not to mention speculation that he has Asperger syndrome and suffered a nervous breakdown at the height of his fame. The Assange I meet is decorous to the point of corporate. He is trim, calm and dressed in a clean suit and open-neck shirt. He’s polite, precise, pretentious and verbose, but definitely in command of his faculties. In the circumstances he could have gone stir crazy and he hasn’t.

He shakes hands (limply) and sits down with minimal pleasantries across a glass-topped table in a stuffy meeting room that he shares with the ambassador. Joseph sits behind me and says without warning that we have 40 minutes. I suggest we’ll need more than that.

Assange speaks with a familiar lisp but has grown an unfamiliar white beard. It suits him, with notes of nautical adventure that may not be coincidental. In the tiny part of the embassy that’s been given over to him he faces “all the restraints, the difficulties, that people would have, say, on a navy ship”.

Or a submarine, I can’t help thinking. Has he had any fresh air in the past three years? He shakes his head. He doesn’t count the balcony from which he sometimes addressed supporters in the early days. Too dangerous. “There are security issues with being on the balcony. There have been bomb threats and assassination threats from various people.”

Does he think he might be shot there?

“I think it is not likely,” he says, as if discussing the risk of rain. “But I’m a public figure and a very controversial one, including in the United States. As a result there have been quite a number of threats by unstable people.”

He manages to seem broadly rational, and the rational truth is he’s too scared to leave. It’s not just the kind of thing that could happen to him on the balcony. The founder of WikiLeaks believes that if he is ever free again he could be kidnapped or “droned” by the CIA.

“Now, OK,” he says. “I’m a white guy. Unless I convert to Islam it’s not that likely that I’ll be droned, but we have seen things creeping towards that.” And he believes that in the more likely event of being marched out by British police, he will end up facing – or fleeing – a criminal prosecution brought by an American imperial machine that will never forgive him for stealing all its secrets and dumping them in three vast, history-making caches on the internet.

So he’s hanging tight. After more than 1,000 days confined by choice to one and a half rooms of a modest flat (Ecuador’s diplomatic service is not rich), there is every chance that he will be there for 1,000 more.

“It seems likely that the situation will resolve before five years are out,” he says. “I still believe that my original prediction of five to seven years was correct.”

Five years in all would be another two. Seven would be another four. Another 1,000 days is somewhere in between. Assange has already been hiding in plain sight from the full might of the Metropolitan Police for longer than the Kennedy presidency. He could still be stuck there for longer than it would take to fly to Mars and back, and in less space, without permission from the British government to leave even for a hospital emergency. He could spend seven years in an enclosure smaller than your average side return.

This is not what Assange watchers were thinking a couple of months ago. Those who want him dead and those who worship him all thought something was about to give. Three sexual assault allegations facing him in Sweden were about to be dropped. The Swedish prosecutor in charge of his case seemed willing for the first time in five years to come and interview him in London. Then, earlier this month, the Foreign Office told Ecuador that it was fed up with this “abuse of diplomatic relations” (translation: this weird £12 million epic of state-sponsored high-security glamping) in the heart of Knightsbridge.

Ecuador hasn’t budged, however. In Sweden the assault allegations have been dropped, but a more serious case of alleged rape is still open. Assange refuses to go to Stockholm to be interviewed about it, and instead is busy projecting the image of a prisoner of conscience.

And who can blame him? Five years ago, he was the albino cyberpunk libertarian sex symbol whom Benedict Cumberbatch would later play in The Fifth Estate. That must have felt a lot better than being a fugitive alleged rapist, and it’s clear within minutes of meeting him that he is determined to recapture the role of guerrilla leader in an unending war against America’s information overlords. He is determined to show no weakness. Even if it makes him sound ridiculous.

What’s your typical day like, I ask.

“This is a perennial question,” he says.

But you understand why people would like to know?

“I do, but running a multinational investigative media organisation that pushes the frontiers of free speech rights and the protection of journalistic sources is a hard job normally, and very intensive and time-consuming. Doing it inside an embassy with increased surveillance means it takes more time.” He pauses. “There are some benefits. It’s a place where there’s no police, and that for a national security reporter is in some ways very positive. There’s intense surveillance, but there cannot be a police raid.”

OK. What do you long for? “I’m not going to be giving the other side any pleasure in saying what I long for or what I miss.”

Interviewing Assange is strange. Damn strange. It’s up there with Stephen Hawking, but whereas with Hawking the elephant in the room is that he can’t talk like a normal human being, with Assange it’s that he won’t.

He is obsessed with the security operation that surrounds him. There are two police officers at all times at the front of the building – one in the lobby, one at the entrance – and more covering the rest of the perimeter. The operation requires the equivalent of 100 full-time police who come and go in vans even though the nearest police station is five minutes’ walk away. There are often four vans in the vicinity, he says, and eight when shifts change – “except when the BBC publishes a report saying how outrageous it is that all this money is being spent, [and] they move the vans away”.

“I’ve come to know quite a lot about the surveillance operation,” he says. “I don’t want to disclose at this time which elements I have detected or haven’t detected, for obvious reasons, but some of it is nakedly visible.

I will say that it’s interesting that they have developed a relationship with Harrods. We have obtained documents from Harrods [saying that] police have people stationed 24 hours a day in some of the opposing buildings that Harrods controls.” He adds for no obvious reason: “Harrods is owned by the sovereign fund of Qatar.”

It’s worth recalling that there are two explanations for why Assange is in this mess, and they don’t overlap. The first is his own.

It’s the story of a crusade against state secrets that started, at least in the public mind, when WikiLeaks released gun camera footage from two US Apache helicopters killing at least 14 people including two Reuters journalists in Baghdad in 2007. The release came three years later.

The footage was horrifying and was swiftly followed by hundreds of thousands of US military logs from the Afghan and Iraq wars, and quarter of a million classified US State Department cables. All came to WikiLeaks via Private Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, who is serving 35 years in military prison for espionage and stealing government property. Assange says the US Department of Justice has a similar fate in mind for him, and he may be right.

The second explanation for the saga of Hans Crescent comes via Marianne Ny, a Swedish prosecutor. The claim that has been at the top of her in-tray for most of the past five years is that this lanky, Queensland-born Guevara of the net failed disastrously to control himself when having sex with two Swedish admirers (one at a time, it’s true) in the torrid summer of 2010.

Whatever he did, I ask, could it have been interpreted or misinterpreted as rape? He won’t discuss the details, but he will discuss the morning two months ago when at long last he was expecting a visit from prosecutor Ny.

It was 8.30am on June 17. “I look out of the ambassador’s window and I see someone standing over the other side of the road,” Assange says. “He’s wearing a mauve shirt and black pointy shoes and skinny jeans, has stubble and unreasonably short hair. And then one of my Swedish friends came in and said, ‘I think there’s a reporter from Expressen [a Swedish tabloid] over there.’” Assange asked how he could tell that this person was Swedish, let alone a journalist. The friend answered that the loiterer had “the metrosexual look and this particular expression journalists have”.

They sent someone out to get his card and sure enough, he was from Expressen. “And so all of a sudden I get the idea of what’s going on,” Assange says. “It’s a media stunt. They’re going to do a walk-up to the embassy door, get turned away [having failed to give Ecuador sufficient notice, he claims] and have this Expressen guy photograph them.”

The details are tortuous, but the air of conspiracy and mistrust of the outside world is entirely typical of the force field that surrounds Assange. The meeting never happened. He is convinced Ny’s grand strategy has been to drag her feet while the Americans build their case against him – and he may be right about that, too. One of his chief preoccupations is monitoring the work of a grand jury set up to investigate him in Virginia. It hasn’t charged him publicly, but as far as he can tell it has been busy.

“They’ve sent FBI agents all over the world,” he claims. “They’ve flown people back to Washington for interrogation. They’ve been found to be behaving illegally by sending private jets to Iceland [where several of his colleagues work] without government approval to try and conduct investigations on us. They’ve done the same thing in Denmark and Sweden and detained people connected to me at airports coming out of the Unites States. They’ve rounded up numerous people in the US and forced them to testify in the grand jury. They admit that the grand jury is continuing. They’ve subpoenaed our journalists and our records from various servers in the US. They’ve suspended four of our journalists’ Gmail accounts, and put gag orders on Google … Google publicly states that it’s fighting additional gag orders in relation to that case. That’s now. So there’s a very serious pending prosecution.”

He says the surveillance focused on him in the embassy is the reason he won’t let me see his bedroom. For whatever reason, the particular fug of Assange’s miniaturised headquarters these past three years remains off-limits except to colleagues and friends, who oddly include the former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson. (“Pamela pleasantly has more substance than the image.”) The room we’re in is where he receives outsiders, including, minutes before The Times, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who dropped in while in London to attend events related to the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. “Detention without charge is a Magna Carta issue,” Assange says, even though he walked in here voluntarily and has never been detained here.

After 40 minutes, Joseph’s alarm goes off. He says we can have more time, but only if I focus on “the book”.

Oh, all right. “The book” is called The WikiLeaks Files. It consists of essays on American foreign policy in different parts of the world, based on the diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks dumped on the net four years ago (after first releasing them to selected newspapers).

Assange has written a foreword mocking Washington for trying to outlaw use of the cables by US government employees even after their publication. Most of the essays are by regional specialists who share a quaintly retro conviction that America is to blame for just about everything. Three chapters are anonymous, so we had a brief guessing game. I guessed John Pilger, Assange’s fellow Australian radical, and he didn’t do much to disabuse me of the idea.

The book is interesting for two reasons. The first is that it’s serious and Assange is very anxious to be taken seriously. He’s still seen by many outside his own world as the hacker with a thing for celebrities. For a heady year or two after WikiLeaks became a household name and before the rape allegations, he was the darling of the dilettante left, fêted by Bianca Jagger and Jemima Goldsmith and hosted in a Norfolk stately home when fighting extradition requests.

The public’s view of him has also been influenced by an extraordinary account of his failure to honour a seven-figure contract to help Andrew O’Hagan ghost-write his autobiography. The account appeared last year in the London Review of Books and depicted Assange as vain, petty, vindictive, pathologically unreliable and so arrogant that he needed a “crash course in self-deprecation”. O’Hagan was not unsympathetic. “The man who put himself in charge of disclosing the world’s secrets simply couldn’t bear his own,” he wrote.

Whatever these secrets were, it’s certainly the case that Assange has rarely spoken about his estranged wife, Teresa, whom he married as a teenager; their son, Daniel; or his early life as the stepson of an itinerant fringe theatre director.

He is coy about his legendary hacking talents. According to O’Hagan, Assange described himself in a conversation as the world’s third-best hacker and Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower, as the ninth. He is reported to have hacked into supposedly secure computer systems at the Pentagon, Nasa and the defence contractor Lockheed Martin while still at school in Australia.

Does he still hack? “I’ve become an expert in cryptography and how electronic intelligence agencies work, but I’m not aware of any allegation that I’m a computer hacker since I was a teenager,” he says coolly. “I’m as much a computer hacker as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, who were also computer hackers as teenagers.”

As for the O’Hagan opus: “That piece has no credibility at all. It was written by a novelist who states in the piece itself that he couldn’t determine fact from fiction, and that’s correct.” They have not spoken since their collaboration fizzled.

The second point of interest in The WikiLeaks Files is its section on Ecuador. US cables here support the view that Washington was wary of the rise of Rafael Correa to the presidency in 2007, and tried to blunt his left-wing policies. They detail his suspicion of CIA shenanigans, including a coup attempt against him in 2010. In the process they help to explain Correa’s otherwise bizarre decision to offer so much help for so long to Julian Assange, who has been told he can stay at the embassy as long as he likes, regardless of who’s in power in Quito. He and Correa are friends, but it was just as important that they shared an enemy.

A year into his stay at the embassy, Assange’s fame was eclipsed by Snowden’s. Suddenly, as if from nowhere (although in fact from an NSA contractor in Hawaii), came a leaker with more secret documents than in all WikiLeaks’ 2010 disclosures put together.

If Assange was miffed he didn’t show it. On the contrary, he dispatched his “investigations editor”, Sarah Harrison (who is also frequently described as his girlfriend), to be at Snowden’s side in Hong Kong. Between them they had to decide where Snowden would go next to avoid the long arm of the FBI. He has been in exile in Russia ever since, and Assange claims it was all his idea.

“Snowden was well aware of the spin that would be put on it if he took asylum in Russia,” Assange says. “He preferred Latin America, but my advice was that he should take asylum in Russia despite the negative PR consequences, because my assessment is that he had a significant risk of being kidnapped from Latin America on CIA orders.”

Or killed? “Kidnapped and possibly killed.”

For his own part, Assange reckons any direct threat to his life from the great American intelligence machine may have eased since 2010, but he’s not persuaded by the idea that it’s better to be pursued by a superpower that believes in due process than an ex-superpower like Russia that believes in, say, polonium.

He deflects this reference to Alexander Litvinenko, the critic of Vladimir Putin who was murdered in London with radiation poisoning, by turning back to his case and America.

“In the United States every Tuesday, Obama meets to decide who lives and dies, according to secret law,” he says, referring to the White House meetings at which the president personally approves target lists for counterterrorist drone operations from Somalia to Afghanistan. “Terror Tuesdays, they’re called in Washington. Secret law. No appeal.”

After an hour, Joseph says our time really is up. It’s not clear why. The normal working day is ending. The embassy’s gone quiet. As usual, only “the guest” will be here overnight, if you don’t count the policemen snoring in the lobby. Perhaps Assange really is going to be up all night slaying secrets, but when I ask what he’s doing next he doesn’t know. I leave and order a £4.50 cappuccino round the corner at the Gran Caffé Londra, where it turns out the police are regulars.

After a few texts, Joseph lets me back in and Assange gives me another hour. They both seem a bit more relaxed. Joseph actually gets up and leaves the room from time to time and Assange ventures some WikiLeaks humour.

“We have a joke,” he says in relation to recent WikiLeaks releases of secret Saudi documents. “The Saudis say they want to put anyone who publishes these documents in prison for 20 years, but the current charges that the US is pursuing add up to 45 years, so I’m in the funny position where it would be better for me to accept extradition to Saudi Arabia than the United States.”

I ask if he uses the treadmill, which is a gift from the film-maker Ken Loach. He says he does, “but I suppose you’ll say that anyway”. He says he’s confident that the Swedish rape case is “on its last legs”, but sounds less sanguine about a sealed indictment thought to have been prepared by the US grand jury for the moment he gets out of here. In the meantime he’s been reading Mandela and others for tips on coping with confinement in small places.

It’s been a big day, he says, mainly because it started with a long standing ovation from 800 politicians at a French ecology festival, where he appeared by video. He is a villain to the 1.2 million Americans who work in intelligence, and to others around the world who think he should have gone back to face the rape allegations in Sweden years ago. Or who just think you don’t help terrorists by leaking stolen secrets. But he’s a hero to many in the land of protest for protest’s sake, which must help keep him going. Something does.

The WikiLeaks Files: the World According to US Empire, with an introduction by Julian Assange, is published by Verso on September 7 in hardback at £20