Assange - Julian Assange: the unauthorised autobiography

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

This digital edition first published in 2011 by Canongate Books

www.canongate.tv

Copyright Julian Assange, 2011

The moral right of the author has been asserted

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on

request from the British Library

ISBN 978 085786 386 7

CONTENTS

Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

JULIAN ASSANGE

The Unauthorised Autobiography

If you want to build a ship, dont drum up people together to collect wood and dont assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

I consider myself lucky to have been born to curious people who filled the air around me with questions. One day I would meet my enemies and they would hate me for wanting the truth. You could almost forget your own name in all the name-calling. Yet I know well enough who I am and hoped I could tell you myself. My name is Julian Assange. And one day the police wanted me in London. The story could end there, were it not for the complications of time and history and personhood. They say the past is another country, but so is the future if youll only let it be: speeding along in the back of an English police van you begin to see the world.

They were shouting my name. Shouting slogans. And the press photographers were scrabbling around the windows like crabs in a bucket. It felt like the van was being beaten and that it might turn over, but it was just the press trying to get pictures. I crouched down and held my head between my knees, not wanting to be cast as a criminal. At one point I looked up and saw the cameras being thudded against the tinted glass and angled so as to catch me. I covered my head with my arms. Then suddenly the vehicle gathered speed and was off. Some of the other prisoners shouted out in their own cubicles, unaware of who I was, evidently shocked at the smashing of the van. Others laughed at the commotion. The show was over. It took about forty minutes for us to reach the gates of Wandsworth Prison. It was 7 December 2010.

I felt weirdly confident at the entry point. I suppose some of that came from knowing my predicament was being scrutinised. I knew the world was watching and that made my plight worthwhile: it serves the cause to be the one visibly taking the flak. Some part of me was horrified at the idea of being branded a criminal for doing our work, but I knew enough to appreciate it could only highlight the issue of justice. Theres no bravery involved in such a position, only cunning. I was asked to sign in my personal belongings, which amounted, on this good day, to a single Biro pen and about 250 in cash. I was instructed to strip, which I did, immediately donning prison garments of a grey pullover and grey pants. Oscar Wilde, when he was transferred to the same prison in 1895, created a noble stir when he found that his waistcoat was missing. Pray pardon my ebullition of feeling, he said to the warder. Ill try to keep the words like Wilde out of this, and say nothing about my own poor stock of waistcoats, but the Irishman couldnt fail to come to mind in that rank Victorian slammer. My lawyer later said I had been languishing in Oscars cell: Im not sure, but the spirit of the man, his fight against prejudice, was indwelling. He was treated horribly and kept in conditions as inhumane as they were heartbreaking, and I have to say it was other prisoners, past and present ones, who were on my mind at Wandsworth.

I thought a lot about Bradley, the young American soldier who was suffering harsh treatment in an American jail, summarily condemned, in my opinion, for allegedly raising the alarm on an illegal war. He was on my mind a great deal in the confines of the cell.

One of the things that happens almost automatically is that you begin to pace up and down. Like a panther in a cage, you have to find an outlet for constrained action. I walked up and down and was sort of planning what to do, trying to get attuned physiologically to this small space. I knew it was ugly and terrible in there, but it wouldnt be for long. You tell yourself these things and try to focus. On the outside world, as they call it, my lawyers were working overtime to get me out, but their world seemed light years away as I walked in circles and felt, like never before, the meaning and the substance of the word solitary.

To reduce the noise, and maybe the cold, my cells previous occupant had covered the air-vent with a piece of A4 paper. Later, when the warders turned the lights out, I realised that the worst thing, after all, was to be out of communication. I live for the arts of connection, and I suddenly knew how hard it was going to be in there, not hearing, and not being heard. Especially hard given the position of WikiLeaks: we were engaged in communications warfare with a number of opponents, and these were situations that needed directing on an hourly basis. When the light came up in the morning, I knew the first thing I had to do was discover how to make calls. Surely theyd make allowances and give a guy some Internet access? I know, not likely. But my default position is always to hope that the impossible is only the impossible until your imagination proves otherwise. So I kept thinking and kept hoping and eventually I pressed the emergency button.

They allowed me to see the Governor. He decided I should be in the Onslow Wing with the at risk prisoners. Several storeys high and several cells deep, the wing has its own culture within the prison. It seemed I should go there because, in the Governors opinion, I was at risk of being attacked by other prisoners. It was a strange assumption, because the prisoners I met were quite clearly on my side. In Onslow, the landings were filled with rapists and paedophiles, crime bosses, the occasional celebrity. I was alone in the cell and still had no phone allowance. No phone and no writing materials and no chance of talking with my colleagues. I stood in the cell feeling defiant but ill equipped.