Andrew Fowler - The Most Dangerous Man in the World: Julian Assange and WikiLeaks’ Fight for Freedom

THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN THE WORLD

JULIAN ASSANGE AND WIKILEAKS FIGHT FOR FREEDOM

ANDREW FOWLER

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston St, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

www.mup.com.au

First published 2011

Reprinted 2011

Revised and updated 2012

This edition published 2020

Text Andrew Fowler, 2020

Design and typography Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2020

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Text design by Megan Ellis

Cover design by Philip Campbell Design

Cover photo courtesy AP via AAP/Matt Dunham

Typeset by Megan Ellis

Printed by McPhersons Printing Group

9780522876857 (paperback)

9780522876888 (ebook)

A sunny spring evening in Madrid. WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson and the organisations Spanish lawyer Aitor Martnez meet up at a caf in the palatial Reina Victoria hotel in the city centre. Three men approach their table and introduce themselves. One is a journalist, the other two are computer experts, but what they are doing on that April evening in 2019 involves neither journalism nor any particular expertise in computing. Theyve turned their hands to something far more dangerous and potentially rewarding.

On a laptop they show Hrafnsson and Martnez an extraordinary sight: video and audio recordings of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange inside Londons Ecuadorian Embassy where he had taken refuge in 2012, talking with his lawyers, and meeting journalists and supporters.

The three men want money for the footage and believe they can get 9 million euros. They will sell to the highest bidder and mention that a foreign TV station is interested. Although Martnez and Hrafnsson want to know why its worth anything to see Assange in the embassy, Hrafnsson negotiates with them and discusses the sum of 3 million euros. What the amateur extortionistswho claim to be working for freedom of expression and who support Assangedont know is that every word is being recorded. Both Hrafnsson and Martnez are wired for sound.

Martnez asks them, If you are benefactors working for freedom of expression and for Assanges legal battle, why do you want money?

We have to put food on the table too, replies one of the men.

Hrafnsson had been alerted that the material was on offer on Twitter. He had made contact, but hed also tipped off the Spanish police. Several officers from the Kidnapping and Extortion department are nearby recording every word of the conversation. The deal has hardly been clinched when the police pounce. The audio recordings and surveillance footage, covertly shot by Hrafnsson as he sat at the table, are enough to arrest two of the men.

It could be reasonably argued that uncovering the espionage operation against Assange might have tipped the scales of justice in his favour. The only charge Assange faced in the United Kingdom at the time was the relatively minor offence of skipping bail when he entered the Ecuadorian Embassy. Sex allegations against him by two Swedish women had long been dropped. But on 11 April 2019, within hours of Hrafnsson calling a press conference in London to reveal the covert operation at the Ecuadorian Embassy, the Metropolitan Police stormed in and dragged Assange out. Exposing the internal surveillance had seemingly forced the British Governments hand.

* * *

For the seven years that Julian Assange lived there, the Ecuadorian Embassy, just around the corner from Harrods the luxury department store in Knightsbridge, was publicly recognised as one of the most surveilled places in the world from the outside. In the early days, shortly after Assange sought political asylum in 2012, the security was obvious. Dozens of police surrounded the ornate Queen Anne style red brick building in a show of force.

As the months passed, the number of uniformed police dwindled, but in their place arose a more insidious threat. Across the road from the embassy high resolution cameras peered down on every person who entered the building.

When I first visited Assange at the embassy in November 2013 I was stopped at the door by a uniformed officer from the Metropolitan Police who demanded my name. I told him he had no right to ask and he went no further. It was an act of mild intimidation.

Inside, as we sat down to talk in the booklined conference room, Assange opened the window. Along with a fresh breeze the noise of trucks delivering goods to Harrods entered the narrow room, making it harder for us to be overheard. During another meeting, although the window remained closed, Assange turned on a machine that created white noise to make the job of eavesdropping that much harder. He had every reason to be concerned about his conversations being overheard. Just a few months earlier a bugging device had been discovered under the desk in the ambassadors office in the next room. Exactly who planted it there is still a mystery, but suspicion fell on everyone from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the UKs domestic spies at MI5 to renegade Ecuadorian intelligence officers opposed to the then Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa who had granted Assange asylum. Just who was spying on whom at the embassy became what former CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton famously described as a wilderness of mirrors.

Without taking into account what other countries were up to, the British Government itself was spending 4 million a year on watching the embassy. British security agencies photographed and identified everyone who entered the embassy. Assange estimated that employed thirty people a day.

The embassy already had its own security and surveillance operations in place. They were run by a little-known company based in the Spanish town of Jerez de la Frontera. Twelve kilometres inland from the Atlantic Coast, close to the Cdiz mountains, Jerez de la Frontera is better known for its fortified wine than spying. But not far from the ancient city centre, former Spanish naval officer David Morales had managed to build a successful business, Undercover Global (UC Global), specialising in security and surveillance. In 2015 Ecuador signed a contract with Morales to protect its London embassy. What we now know is that sometime later, according to documents filed in a Spanish court, UC Global began working as a double agent, around January 2017. The material the company gathered wasnt only being collected for the Ecuadorian Government; secret access to the UC Global server had been given to others, with the explicit instruction from Morales that the Ecuadorian Government was not to be told about this special arrangement.