the many arrows of the unbelievers. A scrum of cameramen thronged the gates of the City of Westminster magistrates court. On the pavement a polyglot huddle of journalists waited impatiently to get in. Other reporters had managed to sneak inside and they milled around the ground-floor vestibule.
The previous evening Swedish prosecutors had decided to issue a warrant for Assange’s arrest, over the still unresolved investigation into allegations he had assaulted two women in Stockholm. He was listed as a wanted man by Interpol – wanted, the Red List notice said, for “sex crimes”. That night, sitting in the Georgian surroundings of Ellingham Hall, and with his options rapidly narrowing, Assange had concluded that he was going to have to hand himself in. He had scarcely slept for days; he was under siege from the world’s media; the way forward must have seemed rocky and difficult. According to his WikiLeaks associates, after taking the decision to go to the police Assange at last fell heavily asleep.
Early that morning he drove to London. There, he met at 9.30am with officers from the Metropolitan police’s extradition unit. The meeting had been arranged in advance; Assange was with his lawyers Mark Stephens and Jennifer Robinson. The officers promptly arrested him. They explained they were acting on behalf of the Swedish authorities. The Swedes had issued a European arrest warrant, valid in Britain. It accused Assange of one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape, all allegedly committed in August 2010. Westminster magistrates court would decide later that afternoon whether to grant him bail, they said.
News of his arrest prompted some rejoicing in Washington, which had found little to cheer about in recent days, as the contents of its private diplomatic dispatches were sprayed around the world. “That sounds like good news to me,” said the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, speaking from Afghanistan. There was a big smirk on his face.
At 12.47pm Assange slipped into court via a back entrance. Stephens told the waiting media his client was “fine”. He had held a successful meeting with police. “It was very cordial. They verified his identify. They are satisfied he is the real Julian Assange and we are ready to go into court.” But the rest of the afternoon’s proceedings didn’t go according to plan. In a beige upstairs courtroom, the district judge Howard Riddle asked Assange whether he consented to his extradition to Sweden. Was he ready to answer the charges in the arrest warrant? “I understand that, and do not consent,” Assange replied. The judge then asked Assange to give his address. Assange fired back: “PO Box 4080.”
It was the kind of apparently flippant answer you might expect from a global nomad. Assange was, after all, an international man of mystery who moved from country to country, carrying only a couple of rucksacks with computer gear and a slightly rank T-shirt. As his friends well knew, getting hold of Assange was exceptionally difficult. But in fact, his answer may not have been as flippant as it sounded. He had not known what to expect in the courtroom, and was nervous about giving away his location in public for fear of ill-wishers. He would have been better-advised to ask to submit his true current address written down on a piece of paper. That would have been perfectly normal.
As it was, his answer entertained the gallery, but dissatisfied the court. Riddle made it clear he was not here to pass judgment on Assange’s Manichean struggle with the Pentagon or other dark forces: “This case isn’t about WikiLeaks.” After hearing a brief outline of the evidence from Sweden the judge concluded that Assange’s community ties in the UK were weak. The prosecution also claimed – unreasonably as it later turned out – that it was unclear how Assange had entered Britain. Judge Riddle concluded there was a risk Assange might not show up for his extradition hearing – or, in colloquial British parlance, do a runner. He refused Assange bail.
The decision at 3.30pm was an unexpected hammer-blow. Assange had confidently expected he would be free to walk out of court. He had even failed to bring a toothbrush. There would be no triumphant press conference, however; instead Assange was carted off in a “meat wagon” to HM Wandsworth prison, his new home. This forbidding ensemble of grey Victorian buildings might have come from the pages of Charles Dickens. It proved to be an excellent setting for another reel in what would surely become Assange’s biopic. His life story already had the trajectory of a thriller. But now it had an unexpected change of pace, with a sequence to come on its protagonist’s suffering and martyrdom. Nelson Mandela, Oscar Wilde, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Assange’s hero), all had spent time in prison. They had used their confinement to meditate and reflect on the transitory nature of human existence and – in Solzhenitsyn’s case – on the brutalities of Soviet power. Now it was Assange’s turn to be incarcerated, as some saw it, in a dank British gulag.
Assange’s situation attracted a group of glamorous left-wing Assangistas, many initially rounded up by his lawyers to offer sureties for bail. They included John Pilger, the campaigning UK-based Australian journalist, the British film director Ken Loach, and Bianca Jagger (former wife of Mick), the human rights activist and onetime model. Also present was Jemima Goldsmith, generally described as a socialite. She was to complain about this appellation, tweeting indignantly “‘Socialite’ is an insult to any self respecting person.” From the US, the left-wing documentary maker Michael Moore had pledged to contribute $20,000 bail money, while urging observers “not [to] be naive about how the government works when it decides to go after its prey”. Other well-wishers who would attend subsequent court hearings included Gavin MacFadyen, the former TV producer from City University’s Bureau for Investigative Journalism who over the summer had given Assange a bed in his London townhouse. Some knew Assange personally; others did not. Some seemed convinced that the court case was unconnected with what happened in a Swedish bedroom. Instead, as they saw it, it was an attempt to imprison Assange for his real “crime”: releasing secret documents that humiliated the United States.
For a certain kind of radical, Assange had extraordinary appeal: he was brave, uncompromising and dangerous. Did Pilger and Loach, perhaps, see in Assange the ghosts of their own revolutionary youth? Assange’s targets were those that the original 60s radicals had themselves struggled against – chiefly US imperialism, then in Vietnam, but now in Afghanistan and Iraq. There were other secret abuses Assange had revealed, too: the callousness of the US military, and the widespread use of torture. But the proceedings at Horseferry Road had, strictly speaking, little to do with this.
Several of the broadcasters outside court were also bemused by the celebrities’ spontaneous appearance. When the grey-haired Loach emerged from court, reporters from CNN, broadcasting live, had no idea who he was. “Who was that gentleman? It may be Julian Assange’s attorney; we’re trying to find out,” the stumped CNN anchor said. Jemima Goldsmith’s attendance was even more bizarre. Goldsmith admitted she didn’t know Assange, but said she was offering support for him because of her backing for freedom of speech. This cause had not been one that appealed much to her late father, James Goldsmith, an eccentric right-wing billionaire with a fondness for making libel threats.
For some of Assange’s supporters, the series of extradition and bail proceedings brought by Sweden seemed proof of the US conspiracy. Assange’s lawyer Mark Stephens hinted as much afterwards on the steps of the court. Having compared the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny to the murderous Soviet ogre Lavrentiy Beria, Stephens dismissed the sex allegations as “very thin indeed”. He was subsequently to assert that Assange was being imprisoned in the very same cell once occupied by the 19th-century playwright Oscar Wilde, who had been martyred for his sexuality. The homosexual Wilde was later shipped on to a second prison where he wrote his famous
In the eyes of critics, Assange’s team was embarking on a PR strategy. The effect was to elide Assange’s
