Who is Julian Assange? By the people who know him best

The son, the saviour, the fugitive, the friend, the man. He also has an odd craving for Vegemite

Below a mosaic of interesting opinions on a complex, historically significant man. Beware however since the mix has been compiled by the editors of the UK’s Guardian, which is not to be entirely trusted. Some of our editors see in this mix an attempt to stain Assange’s image via the old technique of the “half-truth”—mix some truth with stinging tendentious statements or outright lies—and the pill will be swallowed whole and do its work over time by sowing doubt. Besides, even the most ordinary person may have some eccentricities, especially a deeply countercultural soul, a sort of technogeek hippie with the brain of a physicist, and the drive of a moralist, pitted against complicit conventionality. Not surprising in the least that among his tenacious (but elegant) detractors we find Bill Keller, onetime editor of the New York Times. The Grey Lady knows how to wield the poisoned stiletto. Fact is, much of the whining by colleagues and others about Assange’s supposedly gauche self-centered habits and peculiar absent-mindedness, even manipulative  tendencies (assuming it’s all genuine), were said in their time about Einstein himself.  Such traits,  certainly no crimes, cannot be thrown into the balance as if they could outweigh Assange’s enormous virtues and accomplishments in the political and historical arena.  Those are two very different things, and any attempt to confuse them is utterly dishonest. —P. Greanville

Photograph: Jamie Turner for GNM Imaging/EPA
As presented in the Guardian (UK)

__________________________
Christine Assange, mother

Julian was brought up to try to put himself in other people’s shoes. There were very strong values: you didn’t lie. You treated other people with compassion. If we saw a drunk on the street, we stopped to see if he was OK. If Julian got into a dispute with another child, I would never take his side just because he was my son.

Jules has always been extremely interested in finding the truth, no matter what the subject – medicine, environment, nature, physics. One thing you might not know about him is that as a child he used to play a mean blues harp. He was also extremely physically adventurous. Someone asked the other day if he’d like going to live in Ecuador, and I said one of the things he’d love about it is the climbing. When he was a little boy, he used to make rafts on the river. He was always exploring in the bush. At one point, when he was about 24, he took off into the Tasmanian wilderness with just a knife and pitted himself against nature to see if he could survive out there. The idea of Julian being this nerd behind a computer is completely wrong.

James Ball, former WikiLeaks staffer

Virtually everyone has a Julian they want to see – either a visionary hero of the free speech movement, or a paranoid, narcissistic creep who’s a danger to civilised society. The reality would satisfy neither side.

He’s an incredibly driven man, with an impressively keen intellect. He also has, on rare occasions, a disarming sense of humour, sometimes even self-deprecating.

Of course, here comes the inevitable “but”. The bad sides of Julian’s personality are as exaggerated as the good. His self-certainty and drive break through to the point of arrogance. His behaviour can be erratic, and he’s not particularly considerate of those around him. As his online nickname “Mendax” suggests, he is quite happy to lie in the interest of what he sees as the greater good.

But the worst qualities Assange displays are not really his fault. Even before the huge storm caused by the embassy cables, he tended towards the paranoid. Imagine seeing senators, commentators and more discussing your every move, calling you a terrorist, threatening you, with that predisposition. The result is a heady mix of paranoia, a predisposition to self-interest. A willingness to manipulate the truth and a belief that what you’re doing is right is a potent and dangerous mix – and it’s what’s been driving Assange, and the chaos that follows in his wake, for almost two years now.

Iain Overton, editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism

I first met Julian when he invited the Bureau to scrutinise the Iraq War Logs. From the start, he made an impression. He gave perhaps the most wooden statement I’ve ever seen to CNN and then, as the camera turned off, transformed into a warm, personable man.

A man who put himself in danger by exposing the US’s secrets would also take delight in attempts to protect himself. Whether it was casually taking off his bulletproof vest in a restaurant, or appearing at the Bureau’s offices with dyed hair, you never knew if he actually believed these safety measures worked or were just a bit of showmanship.

Despite being an expert in secrecy, he talks unguardedly and freely when you are alone with him. And he can show an often sensitive and playful manner. Other times – like when debating what names should be redacted from the Wikileaks data – he could be judgmental and reluctant to hear the alternative view.

Alan Rusbridger, Guardian editor

In his unapproved and ghosted autobiography, Assange gives a colourful account of a marathon eight-hour meeting we had in the run-up to the publication of the State Department cables. Some of it was accurate – though I can’t personally testify as to whether my eyes were, as he describes, “rolling around the room like marbles on a pogo stick”. They may have been.

The meeting took place in tense circumstances. The massive cache of cables, into which we had put months of work, had leaked from a former Wikileaks associate to a freelance journalist. It looked as if all our time and effort might come to nothing. And Assange was refusing to have any more dealings with the New York Times unless the paper’s then editor, Bill Keller, promised to publish a front-page apology for having published a not wholly flattering profile of the WikiLeaks founder. We’d been told that Assange had begun, behind our backs, to talk to other American publishers.

The eight hours began angrily. Assange, who had brought two lawyers with him, did a lot of shouting and accusing. The louder the shouting, the more mannered and Dickensian his language became. He repeatedly accused us of not being “gentlemen”. My eyes may well have been rolling. I did my best to lower the temperature. He gradually went off the boil.

We took a break and reconvened. Shouty Assange was now Strategic Assange. We would cooperate, after all. The snowy-haired Australian spoke deliberately. I remember thinking that, in a different life, he could have been a CEO or COO. He was intelligent, calm and incisive.

All was going so well. We broke for a meal, during which he was witty and did his best – it felt as if was difficult for him – to make conversation. He was almost charming.

And then, just as suddenly, he switched back to Shouty Assange. There was no deal. Keller must apologise. He would have nothing to do with us. It was now 1am. I rang Keller, knowing in advance what his answer would be. Assange ranted at his refusal to apologise. On his way out into the night an hour later – still no deal – he muttered a veiled threat at the Guardian’s reporter who had worked most closely with him, David Leigh.

The next morning there was a deal. I didn’t have many more personal dealings with him. He disappeared from view (we later learned, to Norfolk) and communicated only sporadically through encrypted messaging until he fell silent altogether. But in that eight hours there was a microcosm of the man – in all his brilliance, paranoia, obstinacy and dysfunctional fury.

Peter Graham, school friend

He was a blond kid, shoulder-length hair, brought up with an alternative lifestyle. At the time, Goolmangar school was made up of a lot of kids from dairy families and Jules was, to a degree, the odd one out. There weren’t too many broken families back in the early 80s. He was not an outgoing sort of child. Didn’t go out of his way to make trouble. I would say that he was always the sort of kid who stood behind. We used to play Red Rover and British Bulldog, and Jules was always one of the last to run.

Daniel Matthews, university friend

Julian and I studied mathematics at the University of Melbourne. We were both in the maths student group. It was fun, nerdy stuff. I’ve always found him witty, intelligent and eclectically knowledgeable. He is passionately committed to justice and the free flow of information and ideas. He has suffered great personal costs as a result.

I’ve often heard it remarked in the press that Julian has some idiosyncrasies. The people who make such remarks tend not to have hung around mathematics departments very much.

Vaughan Smith, housed Assange for more than a year when he was on bail

Julian is somebody who will give you a surprising amount of time if he gets into a conversation. But other times you could walk past him and he wouldn’t even know you were there because he was so transfixed with his computer. He would work late into the night. I get up early and go to bed early, but he’s the opposite. A lot of people from a lot of different countries came through the hall to visit him. A couple of Australians brought rather a lot of Vegemite. He and his guests used to enjoy trying alcohol from different parts of the world. Julian would enjoy the occasional cigar, but it was difficult for him to smoke them because he had to stay in the house for fear of breaking his bail conditions.

It wasn’t always easy having him there, but I’m not attributing the difficulty to him, rather to having someone in the house all that time. And most of the complaints weren’t really about Julian, they were about the people who’d come through the house to see him. There was an of average five to seven people staying at one time – people who wanted to see Julian. By giving him bail, I was therefore opening my door to a lot of other people. But we adjusted to that and we had a really good housekeeper who made it all happen. Julian did do some chores. He used to collect wood and eggs sometimes.

I have four daughters and a son, who got to know Julian. He got on particularly well with my five-year-old. He used to give her sweets and things like that. I’ve got a photo of him cutting up a pumpkin with the girls all dressed up for Halloween. He fitted in with a family, although I wouldn’t describe him as a family man.

You can tease Julian, but he usually falls out with people who are themselves very strong characters. They will blame him and he will blame them.

Heather Brooke, journalist

The first time I met Assange, he was convinced a sniper was targeting him through the windows of a conference centre. A few hours later, he was happily typing in front of the same windows. I asked why he believed he was a target. “I can’t tell you,” he said. Then, five minutes later, he did. He told me I should come to Washington DC for a press conference. Why? I can’t tell you. Again, five minutes later, he told me about the Collateral Murder video.

Assange attributed his drive to his first experience with power as a young man (hacking into the email of a Pentagon general). I said maybe I liked investigating politicians’ expenses because that had been my first big investigation as a student. “No, it’s different when you’re a young man.” Can’t women be driven the same way? “No, they’re not.” It was a definitive statement, no supporting evidence needed.

I followed up with requests to interview him for my book. I received florid emails such as, “I will have you, Heather, of course I will. But let us be messiahs to generation WHY, not a bunch of ageing hacks looking for a pension… regards from intrigue hotel… I have more interesting adventures for you…”

When he suddenly turned up in London, he wanted me to put him up and act as some sort of mother surrogate. “I have a fever. I’m not sure yet if it’s going up or down,” he told me. “I need some mothering. Someone to make me chicken noodle soup and bring me cookies in bed.”

I later heard from two other women who said Assange pulled the same “poor little lost boy” trick on them in an attempt to finagle his way into their homes. I said that was not how I conducted interviews. He complained that I didn’t have a maternal instinct, adding in drama-queen fashion: “I have two wars to stop.”

I replied: “Yeah, it’s a tough life being a messiah.” His response left me speechless: “Will you be my Mary Magdalene, Heather? And bathe my feet at the cross.”

Jérémie Zimmermann, friend and founder of La Quadrature du Net, a group defending freedoms online

When we first met in 2009, Julian struck me as one of the brightest minds I had ever encountered. He has a deep understanding of technology and its importance for building better societies, where citizens are empowered rather than controlled. He has certain characteristics that you find only in very technical people and some people with Asperger’s syndrome. He is very focused, and when he’s in front of a computer screen it can be difficult to get his attention. He is very self-confident, which is a good quality most of the time, but is why he needs his friends sometimes to introduce some doubt into his mind. You have to learn how to argue with him and push your opinions through by being very persuasive. People criticise him for having a great ego. Of course he has – he wouldn’t be doing such crazy things without a great ego – but I believe that his sense of the general interest is far greater than his ego.

Julian is quite a nomadic person. He is used to travelling a lot, and having no physical attachments. For that reason, I imagine being in the Ecuadorian embassy will be hard for him. But in other ways he will cope fine. He has a sharp sense of humour, which can be very cynical and dark. I’ve seen him sleep on couches and under tables, and unless the people around him force him into the shower, he might not change his clothes for days. I do the same when I’m immersed in work that I think is more important than the smell of my armpits.

When the Sweden story first broke, I told Julian, “If you’ve done something wrong, you’ll pay for what you did, but for me it won’t change who you are and what you have achieved.” With WikiLeaks he has brought global attention to whistleblowing. He has shown that digital technologies can empower people by exposing the wrongdoings of institutions. People who criticise him based on personality traits should take a better look at what he has achieved.

John Pilger, journalist and friend

I’ve known Julian Assange from the beginning of his extraordinary struggle in London. What struck me straight away was his fearlessness, though courage is a better word. By standing up to the most rapacious forces in the world today, and telling people in many countries what the powerful say and do behind their backs, he’s made enemies of a kind journalists should wear as a badge of honour, but rarely do. The jealousy and envy he attracts often come from those aware of their own collusion with power and unforgiving of one who refuses to join their incestuous club. Personally, I find him the best of company: visiting him at the Ecuadorean embassy or in long phone conversations, often in the early hours of the morning, we share a similar black humour. The other night, we mined Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. I took him over the movie, along with Dr Strangelove and Borat. Given his restless energy, his spirits are remarkable in the circumstances; and he’s fortunate to have the support of a group of unflagging, thoroughly impressive people, not least his mother, Christine. All power to him.

Sarah Saunders, friend, who put up the majority of his bail

Julian stayed at my house from Christmas of last year until he left for the embassy. If I had to choose one attribute of his, it would be that Julian is very inquisitive. His ability to ask incisive and interesting questions is compelling, and it’s why he has been effective in his work.

Julian likes food and wants to know all about what he’s eating (as a chef and lifetime foodie, I like this about him, too), even if he appears to be distracted by his computer or playing with my Jack Russell when he should be at the table to eat! He is very scientific about his cooking. He made a very good poached egg, which not everyone can achieve.

I’m a bit of a night bird, so it was no problem for me that he liked to work at odd hours. We’d chat across the dining room table doing work at 2am.

Bill Keller, former editor, New York Times

I’ve never actually met Julian Assange. All of our conversations have been telephonic – including one where he hovered like the Great and Powerful Oz, via Skype, over a stage in Berkeley where yet another panel was pondering the meaning of WikiLeaks. All of our conversations, including that one, consisted mainly of Julian scolding The New York Times and me personally for not playing by his rules, for failing to recognise the supreme righteousness of his cause, and for portraying him in our pages as a complicated and controversial figure. “Where’s the respect?” he demanded plaintively in one call. “Where’s the respect?”

Short of practicing Freud without a licence, I can’t pretend to reconcile the many contradictions of Julian. He is indignant at the long delays in due process afforded Bradley Manning, but unwilling to submit himself to the due process of Sweden – or the United States, should it come to that. (If it does, I firmly believe he should enjoy the full protection of the First Amendment.) A champion of free press (during his Evita moment on the balcony of Ecuador’s embassy, he deplored Russia’s hamhanded punishment of Pussy Riot), he accepted a TV gig sponsored by Putin’s Kremlin, and has become soulmates with the press-gagging Ecuadoran president. He is the leader of an organisation that wants to be regarded as a beacon of truth, but boasts of fabricating juvenile hoaxes.

Perhaps the ultimate and irreconcilable contradiction, though, was his yearning – “Where’s the respect?” – to possess both the adulation of the angry disaffected and the serious regard of the established.

Mark Stephens, former Assange lawyer

He has an encyclopedic knowledge – and I mean that in the true sense of the word – of current affairs. He can talk to you about any particular country of the world with as much detail and knowledge and insight into the nuances of politics and current affairs as you and I can speak about British politics. He really does get a mixed reaction from people. He a person about whom myths grow easily and perhaps over readily. There are a lot of apocryphal stories – stories like he doesn’t flush the toilet or doesn’t wash – all of which don’t ring true to anyone who has been in close proximity.

Ken Loach, film-maker who put up bail

I was contacted by a mutual friend when the court case arose and he was going to be arrested. I met him a couple of times and again in the embassy. He was very keen for some human contact, some conversation that wasn’t about Julian Assange. We chatted about politics generally and current affairs. He’s a very interesting thoughtful lad. He’d gone from house arrest to another confinement. As we went in, you could see the massed ranks of police and people watching nearby. That wasn’t a figment of his imagination. He was good company. We laughed about things, shared our feelings of dismay at the way certain people you’d have expected to have stood up for him have behaved. I took him some films, one or two of mine, and some others as well. He was quite low key, relaxed and friendly.

Dr Suelette Dreyfus, author and journalist

Julian and I worked on the book Underground, which was about a group of computer hackers in the 1980s and 90s. He’d go off to research something and would dig and dig until he had unearthed even the most obscure source. I’ve met very few journalists who are as driven. He’d ring at midnight or 1am. He didn’t own a watch. He’s always been about content, not constraints. That’s rare. When I was in the midst of writing a chapter, he’d call up and say: “Don’t self-censor when you write!” It was his catch-cry. Even then, his philosophy was to get the facts out there and let the reader decide.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, worked for WikiLeaks until 2010

I met Julian online in 2007. We started working together, and it went from really good to really bad over three years. We didn’t agree about where we wanted to go with WikiLeaks. It was developing from an organisation supporting whistleblowers to one that has an entire secrecy agenda. But it’s Julian’s project – it’s his idea. And he is not really good with criticism. He takes a no compromise position.

We haven’t spoken since I quit. We had a tight relationship for more than three years – I would have called it a friendship. I’m not sure if I would any more, because I’m quite disillusioned. But he stayed with me a couple of times, the longest was for two months or so.

Julian’s more than just intelligent – he’s streetwise, witty. He’s good at thinking about and analysing systems. And he is really dedicated. Here was someone equally willing to do whatever was necessary. But if you’re really good at something, it usually means you’re terrible at something else.

We basically had to decide if a mutiny was what we needed – in order to readjust the way that WikiLeaks was developing. Or if we should quit and try to find another way to approach it. And we decided on the latter. The name of WikiLeaks is tainted now. I’ll never be involved with Wikileaks again. I can’t even imagine he would excuse himself. He wouldn’t be in this mess if he had the capacity for saying sorry.

Julian has been dealing with this level of attention for more than a year now. And the attention is crucial, in respect to his potential affairs with the US. Whatever happens will set a precedent for the freedom of the press and the internet. I’m torn, because I fully agree that he should never be extradited to the US. But the court of law is there to establish what is right and wrong, and if you have violated a law, and we’re ignoring it because we’re sacrificing that for a higher goal, you’re opening up a Pandora’s box.

Ian Katz, deputy editor, the Guardian

Referring to a heterosexual male reporter who had fallen out with him particularly badly, Julian once claimed to me that the journalist had been “in love with me”. It was, like so many things Assange says, preposterous, but it also contained a germ of truth. Assange is one of a tiny number of people I have met – Peter Mandelson is another – whose approval it is hard not to crave.

The first time I met him, he was deathly pale and racked by a tubercular cough. We spent an hour or so talking about the best ways to communicate outside the earshot of the CIA. He told me about encrypted phones and taught me how to create a number code. It was like being inducted into a mildly glamorous, if slightly malodorous, secret club.

Over the following weeks we communicated mostly by encrypted internet chat. In these late-night exchanges – Julian never rose before lunchtime – he lurched between stentorian admonishments for the latest perceived failure of his journalistic collaborators (“We are very disappointed…”) and knowing matiness. I remember him once, rather over-familiarly, referring to me as “Katzy”, and wondering if he was really telling me that he’d done his research and knew that is what my oldest friends called me.

My last face-to-face encounter with Julian was a rather surreal four-hour conversation in the Norfolk pile that became his virtual prison while he awaited extradition hearings. By now, for reasons too complicated to recount, Julian had taken against the Guardian and declared that he regarded it as a greater threat to him than the Pentagon.

Seated under the severe gaze of several generations of previous inhabitants of Ellingham Hall, Julian delivered a rambling disquisition that displayed many of the frequently contradictory aspects of his personality. There was a thoughtful discussion of the ephemeral nature of the internet and a fiendishly complicated plan he had to fix it, a hard-headed and acute assessment of how the publication of thousands of secret diplomatic cables had gone, a few flashes of menace (one former colleague suspected of leaking had now been “sat on”) and some eye-wateringly unsavoury references to sex.

We parted with a peace agreement of sorts, which Julian summarised in his curiously mannered, other-worldly vernacular: “I’m a gentleman. I won’t throw the first punch.”

• Interviews by Alison Rourke, Merope Mills, Liese Spencer, Charlotte Northedge and Becky Barnicoat

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