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.
