From hacker to hunted figure: Julian Assange’s polarizing legacy

In his two-decade odyssey from Australian hacker to new-age media celebrity, hunted figure, eternal prisoner and finally free man, Julian Assange has always been easier to caricature than to characterize.

The lack of an agreed label for Mr Assange: is he a heroic crusader for the truth or a reckless leaker who endangered lives? – makes any assessment of his legacy ambiguous at best.

Whatever history may judge of Mr. Assange, his appearance Wednesday in a courtroom on a remote Pacific island, where he pleaded guilty to a single charge of violating the U.S. Espionage Act, was a fitting coda to a story that will always stranger than fiction has seemed.

From the moment he founded WikiLeaks in 2006, Mr. Assange, 52, was a polarizing figure who used the Internet to obtain and publish government secrets. His revelations, from confidential diplomatic cables to civilian casualties in the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, emboldened those who believed in his gospel of radical transparency. To others who feared that the information he revealed could cost lives, he was destructive, even if there was never evidence that lives had been lost.

After his sensational leaks angered the White House, Mr. Assange spent 12 years in London fighting extradition, first to Sweden and then to the United States. He was holed up in a South American embassy and later languished in a British prison, but he reappeared in the headlines every time a court ruled on his latest appeal. He became less a progressive rebel than a ghostly throwback to another time.

“Julian Assange has sacrificed so many years for freedom of speech, freedom of the press,” Barry Pollack, a lawyer who represented Mr. Assange in his plea negotiations with U.S. authorities, said Wednesday in Canberra, Australia. “He has sacrificed his own freedom.”

At its best, WikiLeaks shone a light into dark corners, often working with traditional media organizations to expose abuses such as extrajudicial killings in Kenya. WikiLeaks documents detailing the excesses of Tunisia’s ruling family foreshadowed the unrest that swept the region.

Alan Rusbridger, a former editor-in-chief of The Guardian who worked extensively with Assange, said WikiLeaks deserved credit for accelerating the political changes of the Arab Spring.

While Assange has undeniably changed history, it is not clear whether he has done so in the way he and his apostles hoped when they first rose to fame in 2010 by posting a video to WikiLeaks of a US helicopter attack in Baghdad, in which a Reuters photographer was killed.

“Consider Julian Assange’s motivations with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan,” said PJ Crowley, the State Department spokesman when WikiLeaks published 250,000 confidential diplomatic cables in 2010, a project the site initially worked on with The New York Times and others.

“We left Iraq, went back, and we’re still here,” Crowley said. “We stayed in Afghanistan for 10 years after WikiLeaks. His legacy is that he worked with Russian intelligence, knowingly or unknowingly, to help Russia elect Donald Trump.”

Mr Crowley’s experience with Mr Assange is deeply personal: he was forced to resign after criticizing the Pentagon’s treatment of Chelsea Manning, the US Army intelligence analyst who downloaded thousands of documents, including those cables, from a secret government network and uploaded them to WikiLeaks.

Views of Assange deteriorated after WikiLeaks, in the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign, published Democratic emails hacked by a Russian intelligence service. Allies of Hillary Clinton cited it as one of several factors contributing to her defeat by Trump.

As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton had to apologize to foreign leaders for embarrassing details in cables that American diplomats sent to the State Department. In one case, the foreign minister of a Persian Gulf country refused to allow note-takers into a meeting with her for fear his comments would be leaked.

“Some of this damage to American foreign policy was irreparable,” said Vali R. Nasr, a senior State Department official at the time who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University. “You can apologize for it, but you can’t undo it.”

But Mr. Nasr said the furor caused by WikiLeaks also revealed something the United States could later use to its advantage: the public relations value of intelligence. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. and British intelligence agencies selectively released material on Russian activities to warn President Vladimir V. Putin and mobilize Western support.

US officials justified their prosecution of Mr Assange on spying charges by saying it would deter other potential whistleblowers from leaking classified material. But it also reflected a collective sense of shock that the country’s most closely guarded secrets could so easily be compromised.

“Part of this pursuit of Assange,” Mr. Nasr said, “had to do with compensating for your weakness by shooting the messenger.”

The messenger proved elusive. Assange’s long exile in Britain, during which he spent seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy and five in London’s Belmarsh prison, transformed him from a reckless media impresario into a tormented, if stubborn, resistance figure.

Supporters camped outside the embassy where he had been granted asylum, holding placards and chanting: “Free Assange!” Opponents saw him as an erratic publicity seeker. He claimed to be a victim of political persecution and violated his bail conditions after losing his appeal against a Swedish arrest warrant on sexual abuse charges — charges he described as a “smear campaign” mounted by the United States.

From his cramped quarters in a converted embassy office, Mr. Assange gave provocative press interviews. Activists and celebrities came and went: actress Pamela Anderson became a regular.

Mr. Assange began a secret relationship with Stella Moris, a lawyer who represented him and later became his wife. They had two children while he was in hiding in the embassy.

For the British authorities, who were in the middle, it was a costly and time-consuming distraction. They had to station police in front of the embassy while the courts processed extradition requests.

Sweden later dropped its case against Assange, but the United States, under President Donald J. Trump, charged him with espionage. After a change of government in Ecuador, he became an unwelcome guest and was expelled from the embassy in April 2019. As police dragged a disheveled, bearded Mr. Assange out, he shouted: “UK resists – resist this attempt by the Trump administration.”

At that point, Mr. Assange’s saga had become little more than an afterthought. “Journalists did not pay enough attention to Assange’s plight,” Mr. Rusbridger said. “People think he’s the messiah or the devil, and there’s no in between.”

Sentenced to 50 weeks for breaching his bail, Mr Assange would spend five years in Belmarsh, a high-security prison that once housed convicted terrorist Abu Hamza al-Masri and is known as ‘Hellmarsh’ because of its harsh conditions.

As Assange fought his deportation from Britain, his case sometimes seemed to drag on forever, as he trudged from court to court as his lawyers appealed against unfavorable rulings.

“Our procedural rules don’t really lend themselves to a quick resolution,” said Nick Vamos, a partner at British law firm Peters & Peters and a former head of extradition for the Crown Prosecution Service. “If you want to deal with every point — which he was perfectly entitled to do — you can buy yourself a lot of time.”

Mr. Assange had his share of victories. Last month he won a bid to have a full appeal against the extradition order heard, after a judge decided that US guarantees did not go far enough in addressing concerns about protecting his rights.

While a settlement proposal with the United States may have begun to take shape earlier, Mr. Vamos believes it was this decision “that really brought people to the table to discuss a concrete deal.”

As the legal maneuvers reached a fever pitch, a few people were able to see Mr. Assange in jail. One of them was Rebecca Vincent, campaign director for Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom group that has been campaigning for Mr. 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 to be in. And of course we had concerns about his mental health,” Ms Vincent said. “But he was still Julian; he was still fighting.

Based on her conversations with Mr Assange and his family, Ms Vincent said she expected his priority now would be spending time with them. His two sons have only known their father through prison visits. She sees his release as a victory, but says it should have ended after all charges were dropped.

Press freedom advocates agree that even with Assange’s release, the plea deal set a troubling precedent.

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said that while the agreement averted the “worst-case scenario for press freedom,” it also means that Mr Assange “will have spent five years in prison for activities that journalists engage in every day.”

Speaking in Canberra, where an emotional Mr Assange kissed his wife as he arrived home, Mr Pollack, his lawyer, said: “Hopefully this is the end, not just of the case against Julian Assange, but the end of the case against journalism.”