Over the course of his twenty years, he went from an Australian hacker, to a New Age media celebrity, to a hunted figure, to a perennial prisoner, and finally, Free man, Julian Assange It is always easier to describe a character than to portray one.
The lack of a universally accepted label for Assange—a heroic fighter for the truth or a reckless leaker who endangered lives?—makes any assessment of his legacy ambiguous at best.
Whatever history says about Assange, he appeared in court on a remote Pacific island on Wednesday and pleaded guilty to one count of violating U.S. espionage laws, bringing a close to a story that had always been stranger than fiction.
Assange, 52, has been a controversial figure since he founded WikiLeaks in 2006. Collect and publish His disclosures, from classified diplomatic cables to civilian deaths in the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, made him a hero to those who believed in his radical transparency and destructive to those who worried that his disclosures might have killed people, even though there was never evidence that he had done so.
After outraging the White House with his sensational leaks, Assange spent 12 years in London trying to avoid extradition, first to Sweden and then to the U.S. He holed up in South American embassies and later in British prisons, reappearing in the headlines every time the courts ruled on his latest appeal. He was less an edgy insurgent and more a ghost from another era.
“Julian Assange has sacrificed for so many years for free speech and a free press,” Barry Pollack, a lawyer who represented Assange in plea negotiations with U.S. authorities, said Wednesday in Canberra, Australia. “He sacrificed his freedom.”
WikiLeaks is best at shining a light into dark corners, often working with traditional media organizations to expose abuses such as extrajudicial killings in Kenya. Its release of documents on atrocities by Tunisia’s ruling family foreshadowed the unrest sweeping the region.
Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of The Guardian who worked closely with Assange, said WikiLeaks was instrumental in accelerating the political changes of the Arab Spring.
While Mr. Assange has indisputably changed history, it is not clear that he has done so in his own way, as he and his followers, who first attracted global attention in 2010 by publishing on WikiLeaks a video of a U.S. helicopter strike in Baghdad that killed a Reuters photographer, hoped.
“Think about Julian Assange’s motivations on Iraq and Afghanistan,” said PJ Crowley, who was a spokesman for the State Department when WikiLeaks published a quarter of a million classified diplomatic cables in 2010, a project the site initially partnered with The New York Times and other media outlets.
“We left Iraq, went back, and are still there,” Crowley said. “We were in Afghanistan for 10 years after the WikiLeaks thing. His legacy is working knowingly or unknowingly with Russian intelligence to help Russia elect Donald Trump.”
Crowley’s experience with Assange is deeply personal: He was forced to resign over his criticism of the Pentagon’s handling of Chelsea Manning, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst who downloaded thousands of documents, including the cables, from a classified government network and uploaded them to WikiLeaks.
Views of Assange soured after WikiLeaks published Democratic emails hacked by Russian intelligence in the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign, one of several factors Hillary Clinton’s allies believe contributed to her defeat to Trump.
While secretary of state, Clinton had to apologize to foreign leaders for embarrassing details in cables sent to the State Department by American diplomats. In one case, the foreign minister of a Persian Gulf country refused to allow a note-taker into a meeting with her for fear that his remarks would be leaked.
“Some of the damage done to American foreign policy is irreparable,” said Vali R. Nasr, then a senior State Department official who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University. “You can apologize for it, but you can’t undo it.”
But Mr. Nasr said the uproar over WikiLeaks also revealed an advantage the United States could later exploit: the public relations value of intelligence. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, American and British intelligence agencies selectively declassified material about Russian activities to warn President Vladimir V. Putin and mobilize Western support.
U.S. officials charged Assange with espionage on the grounds that the move would deter other would-be whistleblowers from leaking classified material, but it also reflected a collective sense of shock that the nation’s most closely guarded secrets could be so easily leaked.
“Going after Assange is, in part, an attempt to compensate for one’s own weakness by killing the messenger,” Nasr said.
The courier has nowhere to go. Assange’s long exile in the UK, which included seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy and five years in London’s Belmarsh prison, transformed him from a swashbuckling media impresario into a disturbed and opinionated rebel.
Supporters camped outside the embassy, where he has been granted asylum, holding placards and chanting “Free Assange!” Critics see him as an erratic celebrity who claims he is a victim of political persecution and violated bail conditions after losing an appeal against a Swedish arrest warrant over sexual assault allegations – charges he called a “smear campaign” created by the United States.
Assange gave tough interviews to the media in his tiny residence, which was converted from an embassy office. Activists and celebrities came and went: the actress Pamela Anderson became a regular visitor.
Assange began a secret relationship with his lawyer, Stella Moris, whom he later married and had two children with while Assange was hiding in the embassy.
It was a costly and time-consuming distraction for British authorities caught in the middle, who had to station police in front of the embassy while the courts dealt with the extradition request.
Sweden later dropped the charges against Assange, but the United States, under President Donald J. Trump, has charged him with espionage. After a change of government in Ecuador, he became an unwelcome guest and was kicked out of the embassy in April 2019. As police dragged out a ragged, bearded Assange, he shouted, “Britain boycott — boycott this attempt by the Trump administration.”
By then, Assange’s story had become a sideshow. “Journalists weren’t paying enough attention to Assange’s plight,” Rusbridger said. “People either thought he was the savior or he was the devil. There was no middle ground.”
Assange was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for breaching bail and will serve five years in Belmarsh, a high-security prison that once held convicted terrorist Abu Hamza Masri and was nicknamed “Hellmarsh” for its harsh conditions.
As Assange challenged his expulsion from the U.K., his legal case felt interminable at times, dragging from one courtroom to another as his lawyers appealed adverse rulings.
“Our procedural rules are not really suited to a quick resolution,” said Nick Vamos, a partner at the British law firm Peters & Peters and a former head of the extradition unit at the Crown Prosecution Service. “If you try to hammer out every point, which he is perfectly entitled to do, then you can buy yourself a lot of time.”
Assange has also had a victory. Last month, he won a full appeal against his extradition order after a judge ruled that U.S. guarantees were insufficient to address concerns about the protection of his rights.
While a plea deal with the US may have already begun to take shape, Mr Vamos believes it was this decision that “really got people to the table and talked about a concrete deal”.
As the legal process reached a climax, some people were able to see Assange in prison. Among them was Rebecca Vincent, campaign director of Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom organization that has been campaigning for Assange’s release since 2019. She visited him six times between August 2023 and last month and said she often worried about his health.
“It’s not an easy situation. Of course, we’re concerned about his mental health as well,” Ms. Vincent said. “But he’s still Julian; he’s still fighting.”
Based on her discussions with Assange and his family, Ms Vincent said she expected Assange’s priority now would be to spend time with them. His two sons only knew their father through prison visits. She considered Assange’s release a victory but said it should end with all charges being dropped.
Defenders of press freedom agree that even if Assange is eventually released, the plea deal sets a troubling precedent.
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said that while the deal averted a “worst-case scenario for press freedom,” it also meant Assange “will go to prison for five years for the activities that journalists engage in every day.”
Assange returned home and kissed his wife. Speaking in Canberra, Assange’s lawyer Pollack said: “Hopefully this is the end of the case not only against Julian Assange, but also against journalism.”
