WikiLeaks Volunteer Hacked a Reporter, Assange Autobiography Reveals

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has revealed in an unauthorized autobiography published Thursday that an Icelandic member of his team hacked into a journalist’s computer system last year to retrieve a database of documents he had given to the reporter.
The revelation of the crime could potentially place the organization, or at least the former WikiLeaks member, in legal jeopardy. The information appears in a new autobiography written by a ghostwriter who interviewed Assange for the book earlier this year.
A British publisher released the book on Thursday, Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography, in the midst of a rousing battle with Assange over its right to publish the book. The book is currently being sold online in the U.K., but it’s unclear when or if it will be sold in the U.S., since Assange’s U.S. publisher backed out of its deal to publish the title.
The hacking incident mentioned in the autobiography involves a U.K.-based American journalist named Heather Brooke, who received a copy of the now-infamous database containing more than 250,000 U.S. State Department cables that WikiLeaks published with media partners in the U.S. and Europe beginning last November.
Some time after the summer of 2010, Brooke obtained a copy of the database from a WikiLeaks member named Smári McCarthy — after Assange had agreed to give the Guardian newspaper and other media partners exclusive access to the documents. Assange apparently didn’t know about the internal leak from his staffer until Guardian editors brought it up with him in a heated confrontation over publication of the documents.
Smári McCarthy, a former WikiLeaks volunteer. Credit: Wrote/Flickr
“I investigated that matter,” Assange says in the book. “It turned out that our Icelandic colleague, Smári McCarthy, had indeed shared the material with the Independent journalist during an anxious moment. He had been asked to work on the cables for a short time to help format them, but, stressed at the workload, he had misguidedly shared them with her — to get some help with the burden of the work involved — under certain strict conditions. He then hacked into the computer remotely and wiped the cables, though it would never be clear whether she had copied them or not.”
Brooke, indeed, had already copied the documents off of the server where it was stored, so the WikiLeaks hack proved pointless. McCarthy, who left WikiLeaks last year around the time it began publishing the Afghan War logs, acknowledged to Threat Level that he deleted the file on Brooke’s server but says that she had given him permission to have remote access to her system, though not to delete the file.
“That was me overreacting to the situation that came up with regard to the way WikiLeaks people reacted to the knowledge that I had been giving her some access to the files,” McCarthy told Threat Level, adding that he later smoothed things over with Brooke about the unauthorized file deletion.
According to an account of the incident that Brooke put in her recent book, The Revolution Will Be Digitized, McCarthy, who is not identified by name in that book, told Brooke that he deleted the file because, “I’ve been put under a lot of very serious pressure and I’m afraid for my security.”
It’s not the first time that the issue of WikiLeaks hacking has come up in connection to journalists. Earlier this year, both the New York Times and the Guardian newspapers suggested that Assange or someone associated with WikiLeaks had hacked into the e-mail accounts of their reporters.
The Guardian revealed in a book it published about its collaboration with WikiLeaks that one of its reporters suspected Assange hacked into his e-mail account or sniffed his e-mail traffic after making coy remarks to the reporter about network security and referring to information the reporter had sent his colleagues in a private e-mail. Former Times Editor-in-Chief Bill Keller also hinted in a Times magazine piece that WikiLeaks hacked reporters, writing that “at a point when relations between the news organizations and WikiLeaks were rocky, at least three people associated with this project had inexplicable activity in their e-mail that suggested someone was hacking into their accounts.”
The Assange autobiography covers his childhood, early hacking career, WikiLeaks work and the legal difficulties he’s faced in connection with the publication of U.S. documents as well as sex-crimes allegations in Sweden.
While it contains few new revelations, the book does give Assange the chance to explain some of his criticized behavior and present his side of the story about things — such as claims from his media partners that he callously refused to redact the names of informants in U.S. documents before publishing them, saying that if the informants got killed due to the revelations, they deserved to die simply for being informants.
One of the few new tidbits is that WikiLeaks’ media partners weren’t the only ones to have copies of the State Department cable database. Assange says he made other copies “and stashed them first with contacts in Eastern Europe and Cambodia” and also “put them on an encrypted laptop and had it delivered to Daniel Ellsberg, the hero of the Pentagon Papers” since Ellsberg, an outspoken WikiLeaks supporter, could be trusted “to publish the whole lot during a crisis.”
Strangely, there’s little mention in the book of Bradley Manning, the former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who was arrested for allegedly supplying WikiLeaks with the State Department cables and thousands of other documents. It also doesn’t address the falling-out Assange had with former spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who staged a revolt with another member of WikiLeaks and formed a competing secret-spilling venture called OpenLeaks.
The absence of this information may in part be due to the fact that the book is unfinished. It’s based on a first draft of the manuscript from Assange’s ghostwriter and ends abruptly just at the point WikiLeaks and its media partners were about to begin publishing the cables.
Canongate Books, the publisher of the book, announced suddenly on Wednesday that it planned to publish the book Thursday after asserting that Assange had stopped cooperating with the project. Assange disputes this in a lengthy rebuttal, asserting that Canongate agreed to extend his deadline for a revised manuscript to later this year, then suddenly reneged on this and decided to publish the unfinished draft, which Assange didn’t factcheck.
Despite all of the drama around the book, Assange comes off fairly well in it, as one would expect in an autobiography, though he has a well-known tendency to see faults in everyone else that he can’t see in himself. There are also contradictions and factual issues, particularly in the chapter addressing the sex-crimes allegations in Sweden, where Assange claims he was warned twice against possible honey traps and was feeling very paranoid and suspicious in general, yet showed a remarkable lack of trepidation about bedding two strange women he’d just met.
He claims that just as he arrived in Sweden a contact “in a Western intelligence agency” revealed that the U.S. planned to use devious means to get him, such as planting drugs or child pornography on him or embroiling him in some immoral conduct. He says Frank Rieger, a member of the Chaos Computer Club in Germany, had written a press release to publicize the information quickly “as it did no good to put these things out after some damage had been done,” but that Assange, regretfully, failed to release it before the women publicly lodged their complaints against him. Rieger, however, tells Threat Level that he never prepared a release or anything else like this for Assange.
Journalists in general don’t fare well in the book, but Assange reserves the most withering comments for his former media partners at the Guardian and New York Times, who treated him badly after profiting from the valuable documents he gave them. Times former Editor-in-Chief Keller, whom Assange refers to as a “moral pygmy with a self-justifying streak the size of the San Andreas Fault,” is particularly called out for suggesting in an article that Assange uses “sex as both recreation and violation.”
“Ladies and gentleman, that last statement is actionable,” Assange says in the book. “It is a malicious libel, and one intended — bizarrely — to inflict maximum damage to a person then facing, as I was, allegations of sexual misconduct. He must have known as he wrote and published that line that it constituted the most heinous assault on my wellbeing, my legal standing and my reputation. But he did it anyway. I’ll never understand why and I won’t speculate.”
One new piece of information in the book involves one of Assange’s earliest collaborators, a mathematician named Daniel Mathews, whom he’d met at the University of Melbourne. Mathews wrote an analysis of the first document — from Somalia — that WikiLeaks published shortly after its launch in December 2006. The document was part of a mysterious cache of one million documents that, according to a 2010 New Yorker profile, WikiLeaks had obtained from someone who intercepted them while or after they passed through the Tor anonymizing network.
Mathews also worked on Guantanamo Bay manuals that WikiLeaks later published, but opted to distance himself from the organization after he became embroiled in a legal dispute that the Swiss-based Julius Baer Bank initiated to squelch internal bank documents that WikiLeaks had published.
Mathews, who was then teaching and working on his Ph.D. at Stanford University, told Threat Level that the bank served him with a summons because he was the only U.S.-based person they were able to associate with WikiLeaks. He had been a moderator on a WikiLeaks Facebook page. After this, Mathews decided to focus on his academic activities, though he remains friends with Assange.
Below are some highlights from the book.
Assange on being fair game for criticism:

From the start, of course, being a whistleblowing website, as they call us, certain people were keen to blow the whistle on us and that hasn’t changed. My response was, ‘Fair enough. We should eat our own dog food and see how it tastes.’ We were a group of committed, idealistic people who were trying to get something done. We could take what flak was on offer, but our basic position was strong and ethical, and I couldn’t see what rubbish could be thrown at us.

On the difficulties of finding collaborators in the early days and having to work alone:

Once or twice, quite comically (though not at the time), I turned out to be the only person at those online meetings. And of course the whole thing was right on the border of schizophrenia: I’d be there, tapping away, being the Chair and the Secretary and bringing the next thing on the agenda and calling the vote. Mad. But I felt I had to go on as if the whole thing were possible, and that way it would really happen.

On the “Collateral Murder” video:

It is a famous document of our times. But when I first saw the footage, it wasn’t at all clear what was going on; the images were jagged and the sequence lacked drama and impact, though what it depicted, eventually, was truly devastating.

On his disappointment in how the media reacted to it.

The storm that blew up about that title was depressing and surprising, even given what I knew about the attitude of much of the Western media to the official US government line. So puffed up are they with a sense of their own importance that, on seeing the video, the first debate they wanted to have was about our title, not about the contents.

On claims that he said that informants named in the cables shouldn’t be protected because they deserved to die.

Another erroneous report emerged at this time that had me saying we weren’t responsible for the welfare of informants and that ‘they deserved to die’. This is just nonsense: I said some people held that view, but that we would edit the documents to preserve their essential content and not throw harm in people’s way if we could avoid it. … In actual fact, we had been burning the midnight oil on redactions from early on.

On the sex-crimes allegations:

I may be a chauvinist pig of some sort but I am no rapist, and only a distorted version of sexual politics could attempt to turn me into one. They each had sex with me willingly and were happy to hang out with me afterwards. That is all.

Julian Assange publishers to release autobiography without his consent

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota  WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange became 'increasingly troubled by the thought of publishing an autobiography', according to Canongate. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP
Julian Assange's publishers will publish on Thursday the "unauthorised first draft" of his autobiography without his consent, months after the WikiLeaks founder withdrew from a million-pound contract for his memoirs.
In a dramatic move, Canongate has defied Assange's wishes and secretly printed thousands of copies of Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography, with the book being shipped amid strict security to booksellers in preparation for imminent release. The enormous security operation was put in place by the publishers, according to a source, to stop the author blocking publication.
Assange signed a high-profile deal, reportedly worth a total of £930,000, with the Edinburgh-based publisher and the US firm Alfred A Knopf in December. The manuscript was subsequently sold in more than 35 countries. Assange said at the time that he believed the book would become "one of the unifying documents of our generation".
But after seeing a first draft in March, the WikiLeaks founder told his publishers that he no longer intended to write the book, believing it could give ammunition to US prosecutors seeking his extradition over possible espionage charges relating to the WikiLeaks cable release.
He formally withdrew from his contract on 7 June and since then the Australian and his publisher have been locked in a bitter dispute over the contract and his £500,000 advance, which he has not returned. Assange, requiring funds for his legal fight against extradition to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault, had placed the advance in escrow, meaning that his former legal team have first claim on any assets.
The Independent, which is to serialise the book, starting on Thursday, said Andrew O'Hagan, Assange's ghostwriter, had asked for his name to be removed from the book. The paper said that Canongate, faced with a financial crisis, gave Assange two months to work on the manuscript and, finally, a 12-day window to seek an injunction, which expired on Monday. Assange has not sought to block the book.
Assange did not respond to requests for comment, but according to a source close to him, he was aware the publisher had plans to release the draft manuscript, and would have liked to have enjoined it, "but the manner in which this has happened has reduced his options to do so. The book is not in a form that Julian ever expected or believed should be published, and certainly he's concerned that it isn't something that he has properly read through and checked." Neither O'Hagan, nor Assange's current or former lawyers were available for comment.
Canongate said: "Despite sitting for more than 50 hours of taped interviews and spending many late nights at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk (where he was – and still is – living under house arrest) discussing his life and the work of WikiLeaks with the writer he had enlisted to help him, Julian became increasingly troubled by the thought of publishing an autobiography. After reading the first draft of the book that was delivered to the publishers at the end of March, he declared: 'All memoir is prostitution.' On 7 June 2011, Julian told Canongate he wanted to cancel his contract.
"However, he had already signed his advance over to his lawyers to settle his legal bills and has not repaid the advance owed since. So the contract still stands and Canongate has decided to honour it and publish the autobiography."
In a preface to the book, Canongate explains its reasons for defying Assange's wishes. ""We disagree with Julian's assessment of the book. We believe it explains both the man and his work, underlining his commitment to the truth. Julian always claimed the book was well written; we agree, and this also encouraged us to make the book available to readers." The volume, Canongate said, "fulfils … the promise of the original book proposal and is, like its author, passionate, provocative and opinionated.".
Given sufficient sales, the publisher confirmed Assange would receive royalties once the advance had been covered.
The Independent says Assange writes in the book about Swedish allegations that he had been warned by a source in an unnamed intelligence agency that the US government was planning to set him up.
Speaking of the two women who accused him of assault, he says: "The international situation had me in its grip, and although I had spent time with these women, I wasn't paying enough attention to them, or ringing them back, or able to step out of the zone that came down with all these threats and statements against me in America. One of my mistakes was to expect them to understand this? I wasn't a reliable boyfriend, or even a very courteous sleeping partner, and this began to figure. Unless, of course, the agenda had been rigged from the start."
In the book extracts published on Wednesday, Assange gives his first account of the sexual encounters with the two women in Stockholm which led to the current demands from Swedish authorities for his extradition to answer sexual assault allegations.
The memoirs say Assange describes one of the women, without naming her, as "a little neurotic". He says that he failed to phone the second women after their night together, which "turned out to be the most expensive call I didn't make".
He insists: "I did not rape these women, and cannot imagine anything that happened between us that would make them think so, except malice after the fact, a joint plan to entrap me, or a terrible misunderstanding that was stoked up between them. I maybe a chauvinist pig of some sort, but I am no rapist."
The book says Assange admits one of the women's claims: that they wanted him to take an STD test, which he failed to do. But the book is silent on the main allegation: that he had sex without a condom against his partner's will.
In the extracts, he also talks of the thrill of computer hacking, and how accessing top-secret websites quickly became addictive: "The thrill was exorbitant. It was like the first time you beat an adult at chess."
He writes of himself and other hackers finding their "ways into the workings of vast corporations" and the excitement of the experience as being "mindblowing."
The book will not be published in the US. "We cancelled our contract for Julian Assange's memoir," Knopf told the New York Observer. "The author did not complete … the manuscript or deliver a book to us in accordance with our agreement. We will not be moving forward with our publication."

Julian Assange autobiography reaction – Thursday 22 September 2011

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota  Julian Assange: The WikiLeaks founder's 'unauthorised autobiography' has been released by publishers Canongate. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images9.40am: Good morning. Julian Assange's publishers, Canongate, have this morning released his "unauthorised autobiography" despite an attempt by the Wikileaks founder to withdraw from his million-pound book deal.
The book – based on an early 70,000-word draft of the manuscript written by Assange with the novelist Andrew O'Hagan and shown to the publishers in March – was released amid heavy secrecy to stop the author from seeking an injunction to block publication, the Guardian reported yesterday.
In a statement to the Associated Press last night, Assange accused the publisher of "profiteering from an unfinished and erroneous draft".
"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," he said.
But the Australian also gave a rare insight into his strained financial situation, which may be helped by publication, since Canongate has confirmed it will pay him royalties if sales are sufficient to first cover his £500,000 advance.
"My legal costs are mounting due to politically motivated legal attacks and a financial blockade jeopardises Wikileaks' continued operations," he said.
We'll be sharing selected highlights and reaction here.
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10.24am: The first thing to say about the book is that it is very obviously a fragment.
The narrative ends before the US Embassy cables release in November last year and Assange's arrest and subsequent bailing under curfew to Ellingham Hall, though the foreword has a short account of his time in Wandsworth prison, which he describes as "a kind of deviant's Barbarella".
The story focuses instead on Assange's childhood and early adulthood in Australia, the origins of Wikileaks through the "Collateral Murder" video release, and the early days of the organisation's relationships with media partners including the Guardian, of which more later.
Almost a third of its 339 pages is made up of an appendix of the cable releases and an afterword, and there is no index.
10.48am: Attention is likely to focus on the passages in which Assange addresses the accusations of rape and sexual assault made by two Swedish women, for which his extradition is being sought (he is currently awaiting the judgement of his appeal against extradition).
In a chapter entitled "Blood", Assange writes that he had gone to Sweden initially hoping it could be a haven, given its laws protecting sources. On arriving he says he was told by an unspecified "Western intelligence agency" contact that the US government were talking about "dealing with [him] illegally", which he understood to mean planting drugs or child pornography on him.
The first woman who would later accuse him, called Ms A in the book (and in court documents), was an activist in whose apartment Assange was staying while she was away. She returned early and suggested that they share her only bed, Assange writes; he adds that he had no reason "to believe that this was naught [sic] but a friendly suggestion."
Given the "stressful" situation, he says he was "glad of the attention of these smiling and affectionate women" though it may be "ungallant" to say so. He says he found the woman "a bit neurotic".
He met the second woman, Ms W, at a press conference, noting: "I remember she was wearing a nice pink sweater." He met up with her later and went back to her house. "My behaviour sounds cold, and no doubt was, which is a failing of mine, but not a crime. I'd spent long enough at A___'s and could see that it would be a bad idea to stay longer. Remember I was feeling especially paranoid."
On leaving her house, he says, he promised to call her from the train, but didn't. "It has already turned out to be the most expensive call I didn't make."
"The international situation had me in its grip," he writes, and so he "wasn't paying enough attention" to the women. "One of my mistakes was to expect them to understand this... I wasn't a very reliable boyfriend, or even a very courteous sleeping partner, and this began to figure. Unless, of course, the agenda had been rigged from the start."
Elsewhere, Assange writes of flirting with another woman — with whom he was dining along with her boyfriend — on the same short trip, but being warned by a friend of possible honeytraps. "I remember he went into detail about how Mossad had captured [Mordechai] Vanunu."
The repetition of hints about possibly nefarious motives from his accusers is notable, given that Assange has elsewhere conceded that it is "not probable" that there was a honeytrap plot against him.
11.29am: More from the Wikileaks statement, released overnight, in which Assange gives his account of what appears to have been an extremely acrimonious dispute with his publishers over the book. Canongate's statement is here.
Assange says he was advised by his lawyers that he would have grounds to block publication, but when he sought legal advice from "numerous solicitors", they were unwilling to take his case because he would need to show he was in a position to pay Canongate damages if he lost. "I am not in a position to give such an undertaking. Canongate are aware of this."
In fact, Assange says, he had a verbal agreement with Jamie Byng, Canongate's publisher, "to deliver the agreed 100,000 to 150,000 word manuscript by the end of the year." He says he was given assurances by Byng in a later phonecall "that Canongate would never, contrary to rumours... publish the book without the consent."
"Contrary to what The Independent reports, I did not pull the plug on the deal, nor was I unwilling to compromise. Rather, I proposed on 7 June 2011 to cancel the contract as it stood in order to write up a fresh contract with a new deadline." He writes that he received an email from his agent saying that both Canongate and US publisher Knopf "insisted on cancelling the existing contract".
"My agent was negotiating a new timetable and we had agreed to draw up a fresh contract for the book I wanted to publish in my name. The last conversation with Jamie Byng on 16 June was friendly, positive and forward-looking. Since then, as Canongate secretly prepared the manuscript for publication, it has found excuses not to interact with me, presumably in order to avoid discovery."
The statement also criticises Assange's former legal team from law firm Finers Stephens Innocent, led by solicitor Mark Stephens.
Assange says that the advance from Canongate was paid to his former law firm Finers Stephens Innocent "wholly without my consent" and is currently being held by them following a dispute over fees.
"The outcome of this dispute is pending, but a favourable finding would release the entire advance, which has not been touched, back to Canongate and Knopf."
We have asked FSI for their response.
1.28pm: As might be expected, the memoir is very critical of Wikileaks' dealings with some of his media partners, particularly the Guardian and New York Times, during their first collaborations on document caches relating to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. "Vanity in a newspaper man is like perfume on a whore," Assange opens a chapter entitled "All the editors' men", "they use it to fend off the dark whiff of themselves."
Nonetheless, he writes of those journalists with whom he has disagreed, "I bear them no deep resentment, but only mourn, as they must, the failing light of their principles."
First, perhaps unexpectedly, some praise of this newspaper. "Everyone who likes a cause likes the Guardian, and I am not different finding the paper to be a beacon sometimes... After the events of 9/11, The Guardian was the only truthful newspaper available in America." Its virtues, he writes, "won't diminish as a result of their infamous venality over me".
(Readers may be interested to learn that a number of Guardian journalists, notably those who have worked most closely with Assange, Nick Davies and David Leigh, receive no mention by name in the book, being referred to, instead, as "a special investigations reporter" and "another reporter... a news guy" respectively.)
But the author is also highly critical of his former media partners, writing of his regret in not realising, soon after forging his relationship with the Guardian and New York Times, "that these people were not gentlemen". It was a full-time job "to keep them honest", he says. He himself was "not always nice. But I thought these were men of action and principle, not weaklings with a crush." He says there was a "very personal" element to his falling out with the unnamed investigations reporter, whom he describes as "behaving erratically and needily, like a besotted person".
His major criticism of the Guardian itself is that, during the period of publication of the Afghanistan and Iraq cables last summer, the paper became more preoccupied with its exclusivity than the material itself. Criticism from this newspaper of Assange as obstructive was part of its characteristic "bitching and hissyness", he writes.
(The Guardian's account of this period, which differs in a number of key points from Assange's, is here.)
The New York Times's editor Bill Keller is personally criticised very harshly in prolonged passages, with Assange describing a request from the paper that others published a sensitive story on Afghanistan first as "a piece of strategic cowardice". "The cock crowed three times, and Bill Kller shamelessly denied us". Later he calls him "a moral pygmy with a self-justifying streak the size of the San Andreas fault". He refers to Keller's account of their collaboration, writing: "By that point I was a bag-lady and a smelly old nutcase, according to him, while he was Bill Keller, the weakest and most self-protecting man ever to edit the New York Times." There's plenty more, but Assange is clearly extremely angry over Keller's account of their dealings, which he calls "sordid" and says contains "malicious" libels of him.
1.29pm: Later, Assange writes of his dealings with this newspaper over the US embassy cables release, after the freelance journalist and campaigner Heather Brooke, whom he also criticises but doesn't name, had obtained a copy of the US embassy cable stash independently, which the Guardian argued increased the urgency to publish.
He describes a now-infamous meeting in the Guardian offices, at which Assange's lawyers and journalists from Der Spiegel were also present. Assange says he demanded to know if the New York Times had been given a copy of the cables, while the Guardian journalists "warbled" about the fact that other copies of the cables were circulating. Demanding to know if he could trust those present, he writes: "It now looked like all their eyes were rolling round the room... who wouldn't lose their temper with such lily-livered gits hiding in their glass offices."
He describes the Guardian as "the most ill-named paper in the world", suggesting that it "had been prepared to fuck us all along" by working with the New York Times on the cablegate release. The Guardian's position is that the original deal to involve the NYT in publication had always included the embassy cables.
He also accuses "my old friend, the special investigations reporter, to write a dirty little attack on me". This appears to refer to this article, which the Guardian published as the first detailed account of the sexual assault allegations against Assange.
2.09pm: Quite a lot of he-said, she-said, it turns out. Canongate have in turn responded to Assange's response to the publication, saying they "stand by" their account of their dealings with him, while his account is "distorted". The full statement is as follows:

"Canongate stands by the press release it issued on 21 September regarding its publication of Julian Assange : The Unauthorised Autobiography. Julian Assange's statement made later that day offers a distorted version of events. We believe in the book and maintain we were right to publish it."

3.15pm: "The work I have done at Wikileaks," Assange writes, "bears the ghostly imprint of my younger years", and some of the most revealing passages in the book deal with his early life in Australia, a peripatetic childhood spent constantly on the move.
Part of that time he and his mother were hiding from an abusive man. "Moving in those years... had a degree of hysteria attached and that, in a sense, took all the simplicity away and replaced it with fear." Wherever they moved, however, "I had a desk for my computer and a box for my floppy discs. It was heaven."
He started hacking, excited by the possibilities presented by his Commodore 64 and, particularly, modem. "The thrill was exorbitant." He and his fellow hackers "were anarchists, I suppose, by temperament if not by political conviction. We had started off having fun and ended up wanting to change the world."
He does admit, at one point, that he has an undisclosed number of children in addition to his son Daniel, born when he was still a teenager, whose mothers are "people I cared about". But "this is a book about my life as a journalist and as a fighter for freedoms: my children are not part of that story and I won't say much more about them." Disclosure is not the same as gossip, he says.
One incident Assange does share was during one Christmas break, when he and Daniel who liked to explore abandoned buildings together, "gathered Barbie dolls and toy dragons and blew them up with some home-made explosives and liquid nitrogen."
4.14pm: At one point, writing about the beginnings of Wikileaks, Assange offers a rather neat definition that might also hint to his Aussie roots. "Our philosophy was, from the beginning, fundamentally anti-bastard, and, coarse as that seems, it's also got a certain honesty."
He describes working obsessively on the early days of the site. He would call online meetings for volunteers but:

"Once or twice, quite comically ... I turned out to be the only person at those online meetings. And of course the whole thing was right on the edge of schizophrenia: I'd be there, tapping away, being the Chair and the Secretary and bringing the next thing on the agenda and calling the vote. Mad. But I felt I had to go on as if the whole thing were possible, and that way it would really happen."

In another illuminating passage, Assange says he was mystified by author Michaela Wrong's "eruption" when Wikileaks published on its website a pirated PDF of her book about Kenyan corruption, called It's Our Turn to Eat, because he considered it an important document. (Wong has said that she supports Wikileaks in principle but when she wrote to Assange to protest that her copyright had been infringed, she was told "This book may have been your baby, but it is now Kenya's son.")
"I found the whole thing baffling," Assange writes, "but another early lesson in the complications of political commitment."
4.43pm: We're going to wrap up this blog for the day, but first some thoughts on the book from my colleague Nick Davies, whom Assange refers to throughout as the Guardian's "special investigations reporter" rather than by name (see 1.28pm).
Assange may be surprised to find an ally in Davies in his protests over the book. Davies writes:

I think the publishers, Canongate, have behaved very badly. I can't think of any other publisher who has put out an autobiography that has been disowned both by its subject and by its author...
It just stops in the middle of nowhere... Canongate have padded it out to make it look like a full-length book by publishing lots of US cables which are already widely available for free on the Internet.
But worse than that, the section that might be interesting is just riddled with inaccuracy. Anybody who was involved in these events last year will just gasp at the scale of it. Some of the inaccuracy is laugh-out-loud stuff...
The US publisher, Knopf, had hired fact-checkers who had been in touch with lots of people... but Knopf cancelled the book and so their fact-checking never happened. Canongate never even tried. They hired good lawyers who cut out all the really libellous stuff and then they've pushed it out, on the assumption that gullible readers will fork out for it even if it isn't remotely reliable.
I fear Julian is right when he says Canongate are guilty of profiteering.

Thanks for reading and commenting.

The treachery of Julian Assange | Nick Cohen

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota

You did not have to listen for too long to Julian Assange's half-educated condemnations of the American "military-industrial complex" to know that he was aching to betray better and braver people than he could ever be.

As soon as WikiLeaks received the State Department cables, Assange announced that the opponents of dictatorial regimes and movements were fair game. That the targets of the Taliban, for instance, were fighting a clerical-fascist force, which threatened every good liberal value, did not concern him. They had spoken to US diplomats. They had collaborated with the great Satan. Their safety was not his concern.

David Leigh and Luke Harding's history of WikiLeaks describes how journalists took Assange to Moro's, a classy Spanish restaurant in central London. A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names. "Well, they're informants," Assange replied. "So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." A silence fell on the table as the reporters realised that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths. They persuaded Assange to remove names before publishing the State Department Afghanistan cables. But Assange's disillusioned associates suggest that the failure to expose "informants" niggled in his mind.

It is hard to believe now, but honest people once worked for WikiLeaks for all the right reasons. Like me, they saw the site as a haven; a protected space where writers could publish stories that authoritarian censors and libel lawyers would otherwise have suppressed.

James Ball joined and thought that in his own small way he was making the world a better place. He realised that WikiLeaks was not what it seemed when an associate of Assange – a stocky man with a greying moustache, who called himself "Adam" – asked if he could pull out everything the State Department documents "had on the Jews". Ball discovered that "Adam" was Israel Shamir, a dangerous crank who uses six different names as he agitates among the antisemitic groups of the far right and far left. As well as signing up to the conspiracy theories of fascism, Shamir was happy to collaborate with Belarus's decayed Brezhnevian dictatorship. Leftwing tyranny, rightwing tyranny, as long as it was anti-western and anti-Israel, Shamir did not care.

Nor did Assange. He made Shamir WikiLeaks's representative in Russia and eastern Europe. Shamir praised the Belarusian dictatorship. He compared the pro-democracy protesters beaten and imprisoned by the KGB to football hooligans. On 19 December 2010, the Belarus-Telegraf, a state newspaper, said that WikiLeaks had allowed the dictatorship to identify the "organisers, instigators and rioters, including foreign ones" who had protested against rigged elections.

The proof of Assange and Shamir's treachery was strong but not conclusive. Given Shamir's history, there were reasonable grounds for fearing the worst. But even now, you cannot show beyond reasonable doubt that the state has charged this pro-democracy politician or that liberal artist with treason or collaborating with a foreign power because WikiLeaks named names.

One can say with certainty, however, that Assange's involvement with Shamir is enough to discredit his claim that he published the documents in full because my colleagues on the Guardian inadvertently revealed a link to a site he was meant to have taken down. WikiLeaks put the cables on the web last month with evident relish, and ever since I have been wondering who would be its first incontrovertible victim. China appeared a promising place to look. The authorities and pro-regime newspapers are going through the names of hundreds of dissidents and activists from ethnic minorities. To date, there have been no arrests, although in China, as elsewhere, the chilling effect WikiLeaks has spread has caused critics of the communists to bite their tongues.

In Ethiopia, however, Assange has already claimed his first scalp. Argaw Ashine fled the country last week after WikiLeaks revealed that the reporter had spoken to an official from the American embassy in Addis Ababa about the regime's plans to intimidate the independent press. WikiLeaks also revealed that a government official told Arshine about the planned assault on opposition journalists. Thus Assange and his colleagues not only endangered the journalist. They tipped off the cops that he had a source in the state apparatus.

Once we have repeated Orwell's line that "so much of leftwing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot", there is work to do. First, there needs to be relentless pressure on the socialist socialites and haggard soixante-huitards who cheered Assange on. Bianca Jagger, Jemima Khan, John Pilger, Ken Loach and their like are fond of the egotistical slogan "not in my name." They are well-heeled and well-padded men and women who know no fear in their lives. Yet they are happy to let their names be used by Assange as he brings fear into the lives of others.

We need also to question the motives of the wider transparency movement. Anti-Americanism is one of its driving inspirations and helps explain its perfidies. If you believe that the American "military-industrial complex", Europe or Israel is the sole or main source of oppression, it is too easy to dismiss the victims of regimes whose excesses cannot be blamed on the west. Assange's former colleagues tell me that the infantile leftism of the 2000s is not the end of it. Never forget, they say, that Assange came from a backwater Queensland city named Townsville. He's a small-town boy desperate to make the world notice.

The grass or squealer usually blabs because he wants to settle scores or ingratiate himself with the authorities. Assange represents a new breed, which technology has enabled: the nark as show-off. The web made Assange famous. It allows him to monitor his celebrity – I am told that even the smallest blogpost about him rarely escapes his attention. When he sees that the audience is tiring, the web provides him with the means to publish new secrets and generate new headlines. Under the cover of holding power to account, Assange can revel in the power the web gives to put lives in danger and ensure he can be what he always wanted: the centre of attention.

Julian Assange autobiography: why he didn't want it published

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota  Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, disowned his 'unauthorised' autobiography on its day of publication. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images
It started out as a dream £1.2m publishing contract, with a vision of many millions to be made for all parties in worldwide book sales and film deals. But Julian Assange: the Unauthorised Autobiography – as the Canongate publishing director, Nick Davies, titled the book jacket – has turned out to be something of a nightmare, threatening the hoped-for profit bonanza.
There are not many autobiographies whose subject angrily disowns it on publication day, as Assange did, when he revealed that the manuscript had in fact been penned and handed over by someone else: in this case, ghostwriter Andrew O'Hagan, who had hoped to keep his role quiet. The founder of WikiLeaks upheld his reputation for 360-degree belligerence by claiming that he had been "screwed over to make a buck" by an opportunist publisher whom he had tried to injunct.
To complete the picture of acrimony, Assange went on to publicly denounce his former lawyers, claiming they were sitting on his publishers' advance of £412,000, which they were holding to cover their legal fees. Assange's allegations of "extreme overcharging" were rapidly denied by the London media firm of Finers, Stephens, Innocent (FSI).
The saga of Assange's memoirs began last year, when after co-operating with the Guardian and the New York Times to publish a series of huge electronic leaks he had obtained of US military material he was arrested in London, wanted for extradition and questioning by Swedish authorities about claims of sexual assault from two women in Stockholm.
A book deal was drawn up and clinched by the London literary agent Caroline Michel, under which Canongate, the innovative Scottish firm run by Jamie Byng, and the US publishers Knopf agreed to pay £600,000 and $800,000 respectively for the rights, with Knopf paying $250,000 (£162,000) in advance. Canongate also agreed to pay upfront O'Hagan's ghostwriting fee, believed to exceed £100,000.
Assange already seemed to have the possibility in mind that he might withdraw from the deal. Sources close to the Canongate negotiations say he demanded a deal that he could keep £125,000 of the advance whatever happened. Byng laughed this out of court, responding according to correspondence seen by the Guardian: "We cannot accept … the idea that regardless of whether Julian delivers (or regardless of what he delivers or regardless of when he delivers), he will keep £125,000."
Canongate also negotiated a crucial loophole in the contract, which it was eventually to invoke. It would pay Assange £250,000 immediately on signature of the deal, as the publisher's share of the first tranche of the advance.
But it said: "If … the manuscript has not been delivered by the prescribed date or its final form is not acceptable to the Publisher, the Publisher has the right to decide whether to continue to publish the Work. If the Publisher decides to continue to publish the Work the Proprietor agrees that all typescript or notes relevant to the said Work shall belong to the Publisher."
With this reassurance, the publishers on both sides of the Atlantic wrote Assange large cheques and O'Hagan set to work, recording hours of reminiscences from Assange, throughout the winter, at the chilly country premises of Captain Vaughn Smith, owner of the journalists' Frontline Club in London, who had guaranteed to supervise Assange while he was on bail.
The money went into the client account for the Assange defence fund, administered by solicitor Mark Stephens, who was conducting Assange's criminal defence. Assange now claims he thought he was getting the services of top QCs and solicitors pro bono. But FSI, which says only the initial advice tendered was free, eventually put in bills that in total are reported to exceed the advance. Stephens, who made spirited speeches on the courtroom steps in defence of Assange, says: "No single person at FSI believes that Julian was overcharged."
But the row over money appears to have played a crucial role in the implosion of the book project. All sources agree that O'Hagan did his job diligently and produced a draft manuscript by March, as required. But Assange refused to sign off on it. Some sources suggest that, after failing to sell the Hollywood film rights to his memoirs, Assange realised that all future payments on the book would be swallowed up by his lawyers. If, on the other hand, he had no visible assets, his legal representatives could whistle for their money.
Assange himself, according to the statements he put out, denies this. He claims he was "not in a position to dedicate my full attention to a book" in view of his upcoming fight against extradition. He also claims that he was willing to renegotiate a delivery date. Canongate firmly rejects these claims, insisting that Assange would never confirm in writing his agreement to any new delivery date. The publisher says that even a week before it put out the unauthorised version, it gave Assange a final chance to fulfil his side of the bargain.
Both Canongate and Knopf were in a painful position. Knopf has now cancelled its contract, and the Assange camp will not respond to claims that Knopf wants its $250,000 back, other than to say it is sitting in the FSI legal account. Canongate, £350,000 out of pocket on the advance and the ghostwriter fees, had intended to recoup all its money and more besides, by sales deals with 38 foreign publishers. Had it not published, there would have been a large hole in its finances. As it is, many of the foreign deals are now in jeopardy and will have to be renegotiated. Only two are reported to have firmly signed up so far to the new "unauthorised" book. One publishing source says: "The economic climate of the deal has certainly altered for Canongate." One benefit for the publisher, however, is that under the get-out clause in the contract it will no longer be obliged to pay the second and third tranche of the advance – a saving of £350,000. Canongate has, however, promised to pay Assange any royalties he is due after the paid-out advances have been recouped.
One of the problems Canongate faces in this extraordinary literary imbroglio is that the book it has put out will be criticised for its inadequacy and, in some cases, the manuscript's errors. Owing to the secrecy with which copies were dumped out to bookshops, there appears to have been only a limited process of factchecking. The book appears to stop abruptly late last year, before Assange had even published his final batch of leaks in the form of the US diplomatic cables. It does not deal with major aspects of Assange's career, such as his breach with his former partner at WikiLeaks, Daniel Domscheit-Berg. Assange himself is criticising it on the sidelines for being an erroneous and unchecked manuscript. Canongate themselves describe it as a "draft" rather than a completed work.
Some observers still believe that Assange stands to make a small fortune from his eventual royalties. The book itself will certainly find a sale among WikiLeaks aficionados around the world. Its account of the Swedish sex allegations against him, still to be resolved, contains new hints that the young women who complained about him were "neurotic", "vague" or had a mysterious hostile agenda. His references to the "hardcore feminism" he suffered from in Sweden will ignite controversy again, weeks before British appeal judges are due to rule on his continued attempt to fight extradition.
A sizeable proportion of the manuscript is devoted to attacks on media organisations with which he formerly co-operated, including the Guardian. These too, are accused of "double-crossing" him. Guardian reporters are characterised as "weaklings with a crush" rather than "men of action and principle", and on one occasion are described as "lily-livered gits in glass offices".
The former editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, is the target of special ire for his allegedly unco-operative attitude, described as "a moral pygmy with a self-justifying streak the size of the San Andreas fault". Assange writes: "The cock crowed three times and Bill Keller shamelessly denied us."
Assange denies the disclosure made in the Guardian's previously published book, that he once said US informants in Afghanistan "deserved to die". He now maintains he was merely quoting an attitude held by some unnamed others. He is silent on accusations made against him that he associates with antisemitic propagandists. He is also silent on some of the details of the sex allegations, particularly the accusation that he had sex without a condom against a woman's wishes. He does admit, however, that he may be seen as "cold" and a "chauvinist pig" by some people.
It is likely that this week's publication will represent a unique publishing melodrama. But it is yet to be seen whether Canongate can turn it into adequate sums of cash.

The 'unauthorised autobiography' of Julian Assange seeks to portray him as simply the victim of women scorned | Alexander Chancellor

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota  WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
In Julian Assange's "unauthorised autobiography", which was published yesterday against his wishes, the world's most famous computer hacker goes into lurid detail about the encounters that led the Swedish authorities to seek his extradition from Britain to face charges of rape. There were two women involved – woman "A" and woman "W" – with each of whom he says he had casual, consensual sex.
At the time of his visit to Sweden in the summer of last year Assange believed that the US was seeking to prosecute or otherwise punish him for publishing thousands of state secrets on his WikiLeaks website, and he says he was then under such stress that he welcomed the attentions "of these smiling and affectionate women". He says he had sex "several times" one night with woman "A", a political activist, who next day "seemed totally happy, laughing, and drinking with me and my friends and her friends until late". And similarly with woman "W", whom he had met at a press conference, he had enjoyed a friendly breakfast and a bicycle ride before taking his leave of her with a goodbye kiss. "I may be a chauvinist pig of some sort," he says, "but I am no rapist." So why, if so, did these women later go to the police and accuse him of rape?
Assange toys with the idea that he could have been a victim of an American-sponsored honeytrap, but he seems to veer towards the conclusion that it was simply a case of revenge for his own boorish behaviour. Not only did he fail to keep up with woman "A", but he was even more offhand with woman "W", who had asked him to telephone her from a train he boarded after they had kissed goodbye. "I didn't do that, and it has already turned out to be the most expensive call I didn't make," he says. So, barring the possibility that he is in fact guilty as charged, it seems that William Congreve was right when he wrote in The Mourning Bride, his play of 1697: "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned."
It has been Congreve's week, for his wisdom seems to apply equally to the troubles afflicting Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat energy secretary. Last year Huhne suddenly left his wife Vicky Pryce for another woman after 26 years of marriage, and since then she has done all she can to make his life uncomfortable. Last May she claimed that he had tried to get her to take speeding points on his behalf, which would have been a criminal offence, and just lately she has been up at the Lib Dem conference in Birmingham haunting him and his mistress, Carina Trimingham.
Huhne told party activists at a fringe meeting that he was "enormously regretful" for what he had done to Pryce, that he understood her stress, and that he had asked her to forgive him. But she refused to do that, and this week she responded to his attempt at contrition with a very angry statement: "I am surprised that my ex-husband considers it appropriate to talk at a public meeting about the very private aspects of our family life. I consider that what he said is a serious intrusion into mine and our family's private life."
I feel rather sorry for the Essex police and for the Crown Prosecution Service that it is against this background of personal acrimony that they have had to conduct their investigation into the allegation that Huhne was willing to lie about who was driving his car when it was found to be speeding.
This may partly explain why it has taken such a long time for them to decide whether or not to prosecute him. It is four months now since Pryce first made her allegation, and you might think this would be more than enough time for the police to crack such a case. But if their decision hangs on nothing more than which of these miserable former spouses to believe, it is understandable that they are slow to reach it. And if, as Huhne believes, the case against him will shortly be dropped, this may be seen as yet another vindication for Congreve.
It is salutary to be reminded how little influence this column has. How often have I begged Kate Winslet to "calm down, dear" and accept her acting awards with dignity, or at least in a manner befitting her chosen image as the down-to-earth girl-next-door from Reading? Have I not urged her to live up to the standards for which British actors were once praised by Gil Cates, the 14-times producer of the Academy Awards show, who said that he loved English Oscar winners because "their speeches are so classy and precise"?
But Winslet has taken no notice. Unconcerned by the derision caused by her sobbing, incoherent utterances at the Golden Globe Awards a couple of years ago, she was no better this week when she won the Best Actress prize at the Emmy television awards in Los Angeles. "Oh look, I really did win it," she spluttered. "Oh gosh! OK. Thank you so much." Asked by a reporter afterwards to explain her breathless ramble, she replied: "It just comes out the way it comes out. There's not a huge amount you can do about it." Is that not a strange thing for a professional actor to say?