Julian Assange boarded a chartered jet at Stansted airport on 25 June 2024, destined for his Australian homeland. Following a refuelling stop in Bangkok, he landed on the Pacific island of Saipan, in the US territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, which is the American possession farthest from the US mainland and also nearest to Australia. Shortly before midnight, he appeared before Judge Ramona Manglona at the US District Court and pleaded guilty to one felony charge under the 1917 Espionage Act, 17 charges under the act having been set aside, and was proclaimed “a free man” in lieu of 62 months of time already served. Assange’s journey ended when he landed in Canberra at 19:37 local time on 26 June and was reunited with his wife Stella, father John Shipton, and two young sons Gabriel and Max. He was accompanied on his private flight by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, currently ambassador to the US, and former Foreign Minister Stephen Smith, now High Commissioner to the UK. Soon after Assange’s return to home soil, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese welcomed him back in an address to the nation, stamping the official seal of approval on his safe return.
The tragic, yet fascinating, Assange story is worth recounting in the light of the events of the past two decades. Julian Paul Assange was born on 3 July 1971 in the coastal city of Townsville, in sub-tropical North Queensland, the product of a brief alliance between his artist mother Christine Hawkins and future architect John Shipton, who first met at an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in Sydney in May 1970. Julian had no further contact with his biological father until he turned 25. Meanwhile, Christine moved with her son to Magnetic Island, seven kilometres away from the north-east Queensland coast at Townsville. She married Brett Assange, an actor and theatre director, and they then moved around Australia with a travelling puppet theatre. Julian moved home 37 times by the time he was fourteen, but appears to have enjoyed his peripatetic life and his parents’ alternative lifestyle. Christine and Brett separated in 1979, and she had another son with Keith Hamilton, a musician and himself the son of Anne Hamilton-Byrne, leader of a sect known as The Family, or The Great White Brotherhood. This latest relation broke down by 1982, and Julian, his mother, and his half-brother ended up in the town of Emerald, 40 km south-east of Melbourne. At this time, Julian turned his talents as a computer programmer to the surreptitious world of computer hacking, using the nom de guerre of ‘Mendax’, and set up ‘The International Subversives’ with two like-minded teenagers. In 1996, he was to plead guilty to 24 counts of hacking in a Melbourne court, but was let off with a small fine. Meanwhile, he worked as a computer security consultant.
Assange’s name is indelibly linked with his most substantial creation. WikiLeaks.Org was registered as a domain name on 4 October 2006. It is best described as an online non-profit disclosure platform, relying on whistleblowers and other anonymous sources to provide classified government and corporate documents and videos, which are then released in the pursuit of transparency in high places. This public-interest website became a vehicle for Assange’s concept of so-called “scientific journalism” and heralded a new era of web-based activism.
Early WikiLeaks revelations included human rights abuses at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba; corruption in Kenya; Church of Scientology activities; business practices of the Swiss bank Julius Baer; a secret membership list of the British National Party; the Minton Report, concerning toxic waste dumping in the Ivory Coast; and private-mails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
WikiLeaks benefited greatly from its collaboration with Private First-Class Bradley Manning, who has since transitioned to Chelsea Manning. A disillusioned US Army intelligence analyst who served in Iraq, Manning leaked video footage, military logs from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and cables sent by the State Department to American overseas diplomatic missions and also between consulates and embassies (CableGate documents). Edited video footage from 12 July 2007, titled ‘Collateral Murder’ was released in April 2010, showing two Apache helicopters firing down onto a Baghdad street, killing at least a dozen civilians, including two Iraqis working for the Reuters news agency.
Assange travelled to Sweden on 11 August 2010, to deliver a keynote speech on “The First Casualty of War Is the Truth” at a seminar four days later. He was intending to secure a residency permit there, which was refused in October that year. While staying in Stockholm, he became involved with two Swedish female supporters, who were soon to accuse him of engaging in unprotected sex. The ensuing Swedish arrest warrant was interpreted by Assange as part of a “smear campaign”, aimed at discrediting his work. Julian eventually left Sweden on 27 September 2010 and returned to England.
Back in London, Assange handed himself in at Kentish Town Police Station in north London on 7 December 2010, and was conveyed to Wandsworth Prison in southwest London in an armoured police van. Initially refused bail at the City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court on 14 December, pending a Swedish appeal, he was released two days later. Supporters had raised a six-figure sum for his bail, and Assange was taken to the Georgian manor house of Ellingham Hall in Norfolk. This rural retreat is the ancestral home of a WikiLeaks supporter, Vaughan Smith, who founded the Frontline Club in Paddington, a meeting place for journalists, photographers, and other media figures which was frequented by Julian. In February 2011, High Court Judge Howard Riddle ruled that Assange should be extradited to Sweden, a decision which was later upheld by the UK Supreme Court in May 2012.
Seeking to avoid extradition, Julian Assange sought refuge the following month in the Ecuadorian embassy at 3 Hans Crescent, close to Harrod’s department store in Knightsbridge, and was granted political asylum by Ecuador that July. Assange became an Ecuadorian citizen in December 2017. During his enforced stay at the embassy, he frequently addressed the media and his supporters from a balcony, and was also visited by celebrity supporters, including Pamela Anderson, Lady Gaga, Eric Cantona, John Cusack, and Vivienne Westwood. Following a change of government in Ecuador, his grant of asylum was revoked on 11 April 2019 and the Metropolitan Police were invited into the Ecuadorian embassy to arrest Assange. He was subsequently jailed for fifty weeks in May 2019 for breaching the Bail Act 1976, and sent to the high-security Belmarsh Prison in southeast London.
Swedish prosecutors discontinued their investigation into Assange’s alleged sexual misconduct in 2019, having dropped some of the charges in August 2015. But the Americans continued to vigorously pursue his extradition for publishing Manning’s CableGate documents, even after President Obama commuted Manning’s own 45-year prison sentence in early 2017. In the UK, the High Court ruled in favour of extraditing him to the US in December 2021, and Home Secretary Priti Patel obliged by signing an extradition order the following June.
Behind the scenes, Assange’s lawyers never stinted in their efforts to free their client and undertook lengthy negotiations with the US Department of Justice. A plea deal was finally reached on 19 June 2024, and Assange was released from HMP Belmarsh on 24 June, after 1901 days of incarceration, during which repeated concerns had been raised over his deteriorating physical and mental health.
Julian Assange is a lanky individual, topped by a mane of naturally white hair, and prone to various eccentricities. Opinions about him vary. His supporters revere him as a campaigner for the truth, a fighter for peace, and an exponent of free speech, on the one hand, while those who feel threatened by him consider him a traitor, who may have harmed the lives of many and threatened national security through his allegedly criminal acts of disclosure on the other. Notwithstanding his powerful critics, Assange has received many prestigious awards for his contributions to investigative journalism, particularly for his disclosures of political corruption, military misadventures, war crimes, human rights abuses, and environmental disasters. At long last, he can now recover at leisure from his ordeals of the past fourteen years and finally take control of his own destiny.
Ashis Banerjee