Show Notes

Cold Open

A quick note before we get started: this is part two in a three-part series on Julian Assange. If you haven’t listened to Part 1 yet, go back and start there. Here we go

The following presentation is not suitable for young children. Listener discretion is advised. 

It was 7:45 a.m. on March 23rd, 2022. 

Julian Assange was already awake, dressed, and sitting on his cot waiting. He was no early riser, but today was a big day.

Finally, the guards arrived.

Assange, let’s go.

SFX: prison door opening

They opened the door and led him out of his cell.

They took him through Belmarsh Prison. They passed the solitary confinement wing. Assange remembered the many months he spent there. Then they passed the medical wing, where he had a stroke last fall.

Finally, they arrived at a visiting room. A place where prisoners can meet their families can meet in privacy. There, a tuxedo was waiting. With a kilt—a nod to Assange’s Scottish heritage. 

Assange changed into them. When he finished, the guards brought him out of the visitation room and into the chapel. Assange wasn’t religious, but it was the only room in the prison that seemed right for the task.

His stepfather, Richard Assange, was waiting. So was his half-brother, Gabriel Shipton. Both were also wearing kilts. Next to them were the prison chaplain, and two guards.

These were the only people who would witness his wedding.

Assange and his family embraced. There was barely any time to say hello before the music started.  

SFX: Here Comes The Bride

Suddenly, there she was: Julian Assange’s bride-to-be. Stella Moris.

She was wearing a white silk Vivienne Westwood gown. The fashion designer was a Wikileaks supporter, and she donated the gown as well as Assange’s kilt.

Stella was accompanied by the two sons she has with Assange, Gabriel and Max. Five and three, and both wearing purple kilts. They’ve only ever known their father as a prisoner.

The boys escorted their mother down the aisle, then joined their grandpa and uncle. The ceremony began. 

Julian looked into Stella’s eyes. He saw how much she loved him. He saw her devotion to the cause, her determination to fight for it. He knew he’d made the right choice. 

Stella, do you take this man to be your husband?

I do.

Julian, do you take this woman to be your wife?

I do.

You may now kiss.

And they did. 

And that was the end of the wedding.

Assange said his goodbyes and gave his wife and kids a kiss. The guards took him back to the visiting room, where he changed back into his prison uniform. Then they returned him to his cell.

Assange imagined Stella and the tiny wedding party leaving the prison and heading to the reception. It would be attended by her parents and friends, but also Wikileaks supporters and journalists.

Assange imagined the press conference that Stella would hold, like she had so many before. She would tell reporters that her husband was being persecuted. That the British government was denying his rights. How they had to fight just for the basic right to marry. All of which they’d agreed on beforehand. 

Then Assange imagined Stella cutting the wedding cake, alone. He imagined her posing for photographs, alone.  

Tragic.

And that was the point. 

These images would circulate around the world. A bride without her groom. Hopefully, they would generate outrage. Or even just awareness of Assange’s predicament. 

Assange sat on his prison bunk as a newly married man and thought about what he’d lost: his organization, his reputation, and his freedom.

But he still had the will to fight. He was going to need it. The outcome of this fight would determine the rest of his life. If he lost, he’d spend the rest of his life in prison. 

On this: sexual assault allegations, the Iraq war, the State Department cables, Ecuadorian embassies, and (you guessed it)...Hillary Clinton. I’m Keith Korneluk and this is Modem Mischief

You’re listening to Modem Mischief. On this series we explore the darkest reaches of the Internet. We’ll take you into the minds of the world’s most notorious hackers and the lives affected by them. We’ll also show you places you won’t find on Google and what goes on down there. This is part 3 of the story of Julian Assange. 

Act One

Now, let’s back up to August 2010.

But before we do, it’s important to note that the facts in the next part of this story are in dispute—like a lot of stories involving Julian Assange. We’ll walk you through the accusations, counter-accusations, conspiracy theories, and legal maneuvering.

So, it was August 2010, and two Swedish women, 31-year-old Anna Ardin and 25-year-old Sofia Wilen entered a police station in Stockholm.

Anna Ardin was  the political secretary and press officer for Sweden’s “Brotherhood Movement.” They’re a Christian subset within Sweden’s Social Democratic Party. Wilen was a photographer and employee of Sweden’s Museum of Natural History.

This is what they told the detective.

Ardin was a Wikileaks supporter who had arranged for Ju lian Assange to do a speaking tour in Sweden in August 2010. The topic was “freedom of the press.”

Ardin was away on a business trip while Assange would be speaking at the journalism conference, so she offered to let Assange stay at her apartment, rather than have the Brotherhood pay for a hotel.

This was nothing new for Assange, who was used to a lifetime of crashing at people’s places for indefinite periods of time.

Ardin decided to come home from her business trip a day early. When she arrived, there was some attraction between her and the 39-year-old Wikileaks founder. They went to dinner that night, then returned to Ardin’s apartment. 

This is where accounts diverge. According to Assange’s lawyers, this was when Ardin and Assange had consensual sex several times.

But according to Ardin’s police statement, Assange began making advances toward her. She was initially receptive, but then he aggressively tried to remove her clothes, breaking a necklace. She felt things were progressing too quickly, but she felt pressured to continue. 

Assange then attempted to have unprotected sex with Ardin several times, against her wishes. At one point she was near tears and thought, “This is going to end badly.”

When she explained that she would only have sex with a condom, Assange finally relented and put one on. 

They began having sex. Then, Ardin says that Assange secretly ripped the condom so that it would come off during intercourse, which it did. 

When it was over, all Ardin wanted to do in the short term was get through the next couple days, until Assange would be gone.

The next morning, Ardin attended Assange’s presentation at the conference. The topic was “Truth is the first casualty in war.”

Afterwards, as they mingled with supporters, Ardin arranged for Assange to attend a traditional Swedish crawfish boil that night. But by that point, Assange had already met Sofia Wilen.

The museum employee first heard of Julian Assange a few weeks earlier, when she saw him on the news for publishing the Afghanistan war reports. She found him “interesting, brave, and admirable.”

When she found out Assange would be speaking in Sweden soon, she made plans to attend.

At the reception, Assange and Wilen flirted. Assange and Wilen headed to the movies, where they began kissing. They exchanged numbers, and Assange headed over to meet Ardin at the crawfish party.

At the party, Assange mostly ignored Ardin, texting Wilen instead.

Assange returned to her apartment and they shared her bed again that night, but didn’t have sex. One friend said Ardin told her that she and Assange weren’t having sex anymore, because he’d already “exceeded what she was comfortable with.”

The next day, Assange continued texting with Wilen. The two met up in Stockholm and took the train to her home in Enköping, a town about 30 miles away. She paid for his train ticket because he didn’t want to use a credit card–again, for security reasons.

That night, Assange and Wilen’s interest in each other seemed to cool, so they initially went to sleep together without having sex. Later, Assange woke her during the night to have sex. She insisted he use a condom, and he reluctantly agreed. 

The next morning, they had sex again, with a condom. Wilen then fell asleep. When she woke up, Assange was having unprotected sex with her.

Half-awake, Wilen was shocked, confused, and paralyzed. She’d never had unprotected sex before, but she allowed him to continue. She asked him what would happen if she got pregnant. He replied that Sweden was a great country to raise a child in. Then, he jokingly suggested she name her baby “Afghanistan,” in honor of Wikileaks’ recent publication of the Afghanistan War reports.

Wilen had already started getting tired of him. Like Anna Ardin, she’d recognized that his behavior in private was much different than the public persona he’d shown when she met him 

Wilen wanted him out of her apartment. He left shortly after.

As the day went on, Wilen worried more and more. What if Assange had an STD? She wanted him to get tested. She texted him, but he didn’t respond.

Growing desperate, the next day Wilen reached out to Ardin to ask if she knew how to contact Assange.

Ardin worked out what had happened between Wilen and Assange. The two women met and compared stories. This was when they decided to go to the police.

Julian Assange learned the police wanted to question him the same way many Swedes, and the rest of the world did: from the news. A police officer had leaked the investigation to a Swedish tabloid. 

That’s right: the world’s foremost publisher of leaked documents was now having his secrets leaked to the press.

When Assange heard the news, he was apoplectic.

He’d recently become world famous, and he thought he’d been enjoying one of the perks. To him, the sex was all consensual. Sure, he could be aggressive in the bedroom, but he just got a little carried away, that’s all. 

He figured the women were just jealous. When they learned he was sleeping around on them, they decided to get revenge and go to the police.

But then, other possibilities began occurring to Assange. What if this were some sort of smear campaign?

The United States, and many other countries, had good reason to want to destroy Assange’s reputation. A false rape accusation could do just that. 

Maybe Ardin and Wilen were both working for the CIA. Maybe they’d both been sent to seduce him, both succeeded, and both made fake rape accusations to discredit him.

Who knows if Assange actually believed that, but in the coming weeks, Assange would say all of this and more to the press, in a desperate bid to defend himself in the court of public opinion.

After the rape allegations surfaced, Assange stayed in Sweden for five weeks to wait for his police interview. He says the interview ultimately never materialized and that when he was told there was “no reason for him to stay in the country,” he returned to England.

Soon, several top Wikileaks staffers soon left the organization.

The first was his second-in-command, Daniel Domscheidt-Berg, the bespectacled German software engineer with the cat who helped Assange set up Wikileaks’ servers. 

For Domscheidt-Berg, the sexual assault allegations were the last straw.

Domscheidt-Berg had felt that Assange had strayed too far from Wikileaks’ original goal, to be an objective publisher of the world’s secrets. Lately it seemed like Assange was more interested in self-promotion through his media appearances.

You’re nothing without Wikileaks! Assange told Domscheidt-Berg. It was the last time they spoke. 

The next to go was Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Icelandic poet and member of parliament who’d helped him edit and present the Collateral Murder video. She’d long felt that Assange had a chauvinistic attitude towards women, and had repeatedly asked him to stop making suggestive comments toward herself and the staff.

But for Assange, the worst ramification of the sexual assault allegations was that they disrupted the narrative. 

After years of publishing sensitive documents around the world, Assange had finally broken through and achieved international attention with the Collateral Murder video. He’d followed that up with the publication of the Afghanistan War reports, 91,000 documents about the day-to-day realities of the war.

But now, every headline was about the Swedish rape case. The newspapers were digging into his personal life, how he’d lost custody of his son Daniel, how he’d bragged about fathering children on every continent except Antarctica and didn’t pay child support for any of them.

Assange had to find a way to retake control of the story. 

In London, Assange holed up at the Frontline Club. It’s a hangout for war correspondents, founded in the early 2000’s by Wikileaks supporter and former journalist Vaughan Smith. 

With the Swedish sexual assault investigation still ongoing, Assange and his supporters dug in to continue their fight. They still had a lot more of Chelsea Manning’s material left to reveal.  

Their next batch of documents was the Iraq War reports.

Like the Afghanistan War reports, these were internal military documents detailing the war’s day-to-day activities. There were more than 391,000 documents in total—more than four times as many documents that Wikileaks published about Afghanistan.

Assange and Wikileaks kept working with their alliance of newspapers, The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel. In the weeks since the publication of the Afghanistan war reports, two more newspapers had come onboard: France’s Le Monde and Spain’s El País. 

The five papers spent weeks analyzing and preparing the documents. By October 2010, one month after Assange returned to London, they were ready to publish.

On October 23, 2010, Assange left his temporary home at the Frontline Club and headed to the Park Plaza Hotel on the River Thames. There, inside the ballroom Assange officially began publishing the Iraq war reports, in front of 300 journalists from around the world. 

The Iraq War reports revealed a side of the war that the American public didn’t get to see.

The most explosive revelation was the body count.

For years, the US military had insisted it didn’t keep track of how many Iraqis were dying because of the Iraq War. General Tommy Franks famously said, “We don’t do body counts.”

The Iraq War reports told a different story. In fact, the military had been keeping a running tally 

After analyzing the reports, the papers concluded that 66,081 civilians had died violent deaths between 2004 and 2009. And this was most likely a severe undercount.

Over the following weeks, Wikileaks and the newspapers would continue publishing the Iraq War reports.

But then, on November 18, Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny dropped a bombshell of her own.

Ny filed an international arrest warrant for Assange, charging him with two counts of sexual molestation. Sweden was asking for Assange to be extradited. British authorities were prepared to honor the warrant. 

It was decided that remaining in London at the Frontline Club was too risky. Fortunately, Vaughan Smith also owned a 10-bedroom mansion in the English countryside, Ellingham Hall. One night, Assange slipped out of the Frontline Club while disguised as an old woman, stopping repeatedly to check for a tail.

Assange was a wanted man. But it wasn’t just the Swedish government that wanted him. The Obama Administration was watching Wikileaks closely—especially Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Assange’s revelations reminded the public of what dismal failures the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were. As a senator, Clinton had voted for both of them. To some, there was blood on her hands. Not great, if you were thinking about running for president like she was. 

But Clinton also knew Assange had possession of the State Department cables. These were hundreds of thousands of more documents revealing America’s true opinion about virtually every country in the world. It could destroy America’s diplomatic relationships with everyone.

And as Secretary of State, she’d have to clean it up.

Clinton was determined to stop him.

In November 2010, Clinton attended a cabinet meeting with President Obama and several of his top advisors. They were meeting to decide what to do about Assange and Wikileaks.

I’m told the Swedish rape case is progressing, Clinton said. Assange might have done our jobs for us. But, if the case falls apart, I suggest we explore other options to neutralize him.

Can we charge him with breaking the Espionage Act? President Obama asked.

Possibly, said Attorney General Eric Holder. How Private Manning’s case turns out will determine the precedent.

Everyone turned to the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates.

Manning is scheduled for court martial in 2013, Gates said. We’re going for an “aiding the enemy” charge, but it might not hold up.

Can’t we just drone this guy? an exasperated Clinton said, referring to Assange.

Everyone looked at her. They weren’t sure if she was joking or not.

To be fair, Hills isn’t exactly known for her joke-making abilities.

She continued. My point is, a criminal case will take years. With the documents in his possession, Assange can expose us any day now. I suggest you convene a grand jury so we can move on him as soon as possible.

Do it in secret, Obama told Holder. Otherwise it will seem politically motivated.

Holder nodded, and the meeting ended.

Assange was already in legal jeopardy in Sweden. Now, the United States was convening a secret grand jury against him. He had one final batch of documents to publish, but two powerful governments were closing in on him.

Act Two

November 28, 2010, was a Sunday. In the US, it was the last day of Thanksgiving weekend.

On that day, at exactly 1:13 p.m., Eastern Standard Time, the New York Times began publishing the first of the State Department cables on its website. 

A few minutes after 1:13 p.m., UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon was across town at UN headquarters. He and his staff were preparing a press report about elections in Haiti when an aide came into his office.

Mr. Secretary General, you’d better see this, she said, handing Moon a tablet displaying the New York Times report.

Moon scanned the report for his own name. When he found it, he was shocked: the United States was spying on him! Hillary Clinton had personally sent agents to tail him and learn details about his personal life.

It was outrageous! Moon, the head of a neutral international organization, treated like an enemy of the United States!

At 1:13 p.m. in New York City, it was 8:13 p.m. in Rome. 

There, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was…well, since it was past nightfall, and since Berlusconi loves his “bunga bunga” parties, we probably don’t want to know what he was doing.

Regardless, an advisor interrupted him to tell him that Wikileaks had published the American State Department cables, and that he was mentioned in them.

American diplomats wrote about an inappropriate relationship between him and Russian President Vladimir Putin, with Berlusconi receiving lavish gifts in exchange for favorable contracts with Russian oil and gas companies.

I know, I know. Berlusconi: corrupt? Shocking.   

But speaking of Putin, Moscow is one hour ahead of Rome, making it 9:13 p.m. There, then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was awoken in his coffin and informed about the State Department cables, too.

The State Department had meticulously documented a Russian government that was inseparable from wealthy businessmen and organized crime. It estimated that $300 billion in bribes were exchanged in the country each year. Putin oversaw it all—some experts estimate his personal wealth totals over $200 billion.

Finally, 9:13 p.m. Moscow time is 10:43 p.m. local time in Tehran, capital of Iran.

There, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was unwinding from a long day of plotting to destroy Israel by watching old episodes of Sex and the City. That’s when an aide interrupted to tell him the news. 

The reports revealed that the United States had successfully sabotaged its nuclear program with the Stuxnet worm. It was a national embarrassment, but it wasn’t even the worst revelation.

It was also revealed that Saudi Arabia, Iran’s neighbor and mortal enemy, had asked the United States to invade Iran and destroy its nuclear program.

To Ahmadinejad, this was close to an act of war. It demanded a response.  

All around the globe, world leaders and government officials were reading the reports, discovering what the US State Department really thought about them, and scrambling to figure out how to respond.

Back in New York, Hillary Clinton was at her house in Westchester. But she wasn’t enjoying Thanksgiving Sunday.

She had converted her dining room into a makeshift “war room” to monitor the situation. She would be making a ton of phone calls in the coming days and weeks. She’d be kissing a lot of asses. And some of the leaders would no doubt exploit the situation to their advantage. 

All of it was the fault of Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

Over the next several days, Wikileaks and the five newspapers would be publishing the private correspondences of 274 American embassies around the world, going back as far as 1966.

It was being called the most significant US government document leak since the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. And the publication of the State Department cables did indeed alter the diplomatic relationship between America and hundreds foreign governments. In some cases, it even affected world events.

In Tunisia, the State Department’s accounting of the corruption of the Al Bouazizi regime would infuriate the population and lead to his overthrow, an event that would spark the Arab Spring uprisings in early 2011.

But American politicians on both sides of the aisle were furious. Republican Congressman Peter King of New York called for Assange to be arrested, and for Wikileaks to be branded a terrorist organization. His colleagues, Michigan Republican Congressmen Pete Hoekstra and Mike Rogers took it one step further, calling for Assange to be executed. 

The Obama administration wasn’t willing to go that far, but it did retaliate against Wikileaks by pressuring companies like Mastercard and Paypal to stop allowing donations to the organization. Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut personally convinced Amazon to remove Wikileaks from its servers 

Hillary Clinton condemned the leaks. She argued that the diplomatic cables contained nothing scandalous, just routine diplomacy. Assange had published the cables irresponsibly, and lives were at stake. She labeled Julian Assange a threat to national security.

Then, Wikileaks was hit by a DDoS attack. The culprit appeared to be a right-wing hacker named Jester, but their true identity has never been identified.

At Ellingham Hall, Assange had his hands full fending off Jester’s attack.

To Assange, it was obvious that Jester was not some random hacker. Clearly, the US government was behind it.

But otherwise? Assange was sidelined.

He’s never shared how he would have preferred to unveil the State Department cables. Likely it would have been a big public ceremony, like huge press conferences he held at to unveil the Afghanistan and Iraq war reports.

But with a Swedish arrest warrant out for his arrest, and British police looking for him, Assange couldn’t make media appearances without revealing his location.

He was seething. He felt the newspapers were getting credit for scoops off the back of his organization.

And the trouble in Sweden wasn’t going away.

With an international warrant out for his arrest, Assange couldn’t travel or even really go out in public. He was trapped 

Weeks after the release of the State Department cables, Assange turned himself in to British authorities—making sure to tell plenty of journalists about it beforehand.

He was taken to a Victorian-era prison called Wandsworth. Over the next nine days and several court appearances, Assange’s lawyers finally convinced the judge to grant him bail. He was allowed to return to Ellingham Hall, but he’d be living under house arrest. He’d wear an ankle monitor, and he’d have to check in at a local police station daily.

Assange returned to the countryside mansion with his fate still undecided. His legal problems were taking up so much time that he barely had any left to devote to Wikileaks. As December turned to January, Assange was forced to pass off much of the day-to-day operations of the site.

This was also around the time he met his future wife, Stella Moris—although she wasn’t called Stella yet.

Stella Moris was born Sara Gonzalez Devant. She was South African, and her parents both fought against apartheid. Passionate about fighting injustice, she became an international criminal lawyer. She believed in Wikileaks’ mission, and she was convinced the Swedish rape allegations were fabricated.

She joined Julian Assange’s legal team in 2011 and was instantly captivated by him. She’d read through the criminal reports from Sweden, and she believed the accusations were false. She fought her feelings for Assange, but over time she gave in.

Months after they began dating, she legally changed her name to “Stella Moris” to protect herself and her family from retribution.

You heard that right.

Assange’s girlfriend of less than a year changed her name for him.

While Assange was confined to house arrest, his legal case progressed.  

In February 2011, an English district court ruled that Assange should be extradited to Sweden to face the two molestation charges. Assange appealed to the English Supreme Court. But in May 2012, the Supreme Court agreed with the district court. England would send Assange to Sweden.

Assange still believed this was all an elaborate sting operation orchestrated by the CIA or some other American government agency. He had no doubt that if he were convicted in Sweden, it would only be the start. The Swedes would send him to the US, where he’d face life in prison, or possibly execution.

Assange needed to get out of England, but that was impossible.

But what if there were a way to leave the country…without leaving the country?

Desperate, Assange came up with an idea.

The week after the Supreme Court’s decision, a motorcycle courier arrived at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. It’s a six-story red brick building in London, right next to Harrod’s department store.

The front desk clerk barely gave the courier a glance. They’re a common sight at an embassy, after all.

But then, the courier removed their motorcycle helmet, revealing a head full of silver hair.

My name’s Julian Assange, and I’d like to apply for political asylum 

Embassies are considered sovereign territory. Assange calculated that if he could take refuge in another country’s embassy, England wouldn’t be able to arrest him without causing a diplomatic incident.   

Ecuador might seem like an unusual choice, but Assange had many reasons for picking the South American nation.

Like many Latin American countries, Ecuador has a longstanding tradition of granting political asylum, especially for journalists.

Earlier that year, Ecuador’s left-wing president Rafael Correa, had called the UK a “colonial power” for refusing to acknowledge Argentina’s sovereign right to the Falkland Islands. Ecuador had an adversarial relationship with both the UK and the US, Assange reasoned, so the country would be likely to take him in.

He was right. Ecuador allowed Assange to stay.

The embassy repurposed an office into a small apartment, and Assange moved in. He slept on an air mattress. He still had a computer with Internet access, so he could continue directing Wikileaks from inside the embassy.

When Ecuador announced that it had a new guest, England considered storming the embassy to arrest Assange. But when English police arrived, they found a crowd of Wikileaks supporters surrounding the building. There would be no storming the embassy without hundreds of witnesses. 

So the police stationed officers around the building, waiting for Assange to set foot outside so he could be arrested. The crowd of Wikileaks supporters would also keep up their vigilance, both as a sign of support for Assange and to act as witnesses should anything happen. 

The stalemate went on for two weeks. Finally, Ecuador officially granted Assange’s request for asylum. He was a guest of the country, indefinitely. 

When the crowd learned that Assange’s asylum request was approved, a cheer rose up.

Shortly after, Assange walked out onto the first-floor balcony overlooking the crowd. He approached the microphone.

He began his speech by thanking his supporters for gathering around the embassy to bear witness to his imprisonment. Next, he thanked his host nation and its president, Rafael Correa, as well as the staff of the embassy.

Then, he turned his attention to the United States.  

As Wikileaks stands under threat, so does the freedom of expression and the health of all our societies. We must use this moment to articulate the choice that is before the government of the United States of America.

Will it return to and reaffirm the values, the revolutionary values it was founded on? Or will it lurch off the precipice, dragging us all into a dangerous and oppressive world, in which journalists fall silent under the fear of prosecution, and citizens must whisper in the dark?

I say it must turn back. I ask President Obama to do the right thing. The United States must renounce its witch-hunts against Wikileaks. The United States must dissolve its FBI investigation.

The US administration’s war on whistleblowers must end. 

Assange finished his speech by demanding that Chelsea Manning be freed from Leavenworth Prison, where she’d been since mid 2010.

As the crowd cheered, Assange flashed a double thumbs up to reassure them. He wished he had someone to reassure him.

The former world traveler was already under house arrest for more than a year. Now, he was trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy. And there was no telling when–or how–he might leave. 

Act Three 

On February 28, 2013, Chelsea Manning was brought into a courtroom at Fort Meade, Maryland, along with her civilian attorney, and two military defense lawyers. She was in full dress uniform.

She was there for a pre-trial hearing. She was facing 22 charges, and she would be entering her plea. Many of these charges involved violating the 1917 Espionage Act, which makes it illegal to obtain sensitive US government documents with the intent of harming the country.

The most serious charge Manning faced was “aiding the enemy,” which carries the possibility of life in prison without parole, or even the death penalty.

But before entering her plea, Manning would be offering her first public statements about her situation, explaining everything that brought her into this courtroom.

Her statement covered 35 pages, which she’d written in detention.

The statement was exhaustive in detail. In it, Chelsea told the entire story of her life in the army. Why she’d joined, how her computer skills landed her a job in army intelligence, about her deployment in Iraq and how she’d grown disillusioned with the war.

She spoke about how she’d discovered the hundreds of thousands of documents that she would ultimately send to Wikileaks, and about her decision to do it.

Manning felt that the American public needed to see the “true cost of war.”

We were obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists and ignoring goals and missions, Manning said. I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this, it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general that might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counter-terrorism while ignoring the human situation of the people we engaged with every day.

Chelsea Manning pleaded guilty to 10 of the charges, but not guilty to the other 12, including “aiding the enemy.” That meant her court martial would move ahead.

Chelsea Manning’s court martial began in July 2013. At it, she was acquitted of aiding the enemy, but still sentenced to 35 years in prison.

She was 25 years old.

From his home/office in the Ecuadorian embassy, Julian Assange watched the Manning trial with interest.

As Manning’s trial was going on, the American grand jury investigation into Assange continued. It had begun in secret in 2010, but had become public in 2012, when the Eastern District of Virginia began investigating Assange for computer-related crimes.

Assange viewed the entire American grand jury system as totally unfair and biased, and part of an overall scheme to discredit him.

After the Manning verdict, it was entirely possible that the grand jury would seek charges against Assange for violating the 1917 Espionage Act, too. American criminal charges would only put Assange into more legal jeopardy.

The Swedish sexual molestation case continued as well. Assange’s flight to London complicated matters. Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny would spend years just trying to get legal permission to travel to London to interview him.

But for Assange, Sweden was just a puppet of the Americans. If he could somehow change America’s political dynamics, he might make his legal worries go away.

Fortunately for him, he still had one tool at his disposal: Wikileaks.

But Wikileaks is only effective if it has something incriminating to publish.

So Assange waited. And waited. And waited.

In that time, Assange’s Swedish and American legal cases dragged on. Wikileaks continued to publish other sensitive documents, but none had the impact of their previous work.

Assange remained stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy, unable to leave without being arrested. He got a cat to keep him company, and at nights he skateboarded through the halls.

Assange and Stella began a physical relationship—even though Assange was under constant video surveillance. At one point, the couple set up a tent so they could have privacy.

Somehow, they kept it all a secret. Stella wasn’t able to tell her friends or family. Her parents only figured it out when she got pregnant with Gabriel. When Stella told Assange that she was expecting, she wrote it on a piece of paper and showed it to him, so nobody could overhear.

Life went on like that for three years. But finally, in July 2016, an opportunity arrived for Assange to change his fortunes.

He’d been watching the American presidential election closely. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton was the nominee. That was terrible news for Assange. If Clinton won, the former Secretary of State and Assange hater would likely continue the prosecution begun under Obama.

On the Republican side, it was Donald Trump. Assange had no love for the former reality TV star, but anyone seemed like a safer alternative to Clinton.

Trump had spent months hounding Clinton for her use of a private email server, creating the narrative that Clinton mishandled sensitive documents.

Then, weeks before the Democratic National Convention, a hacker calling themselves Guccifer 2.0 began Tweeting that they had hacked into the Democratic National Committee.

And if you’d like to learn more about the DNC hacks, check out episode 6 about Guccifer 2.0, and episode 18 about Fancy Bear.

Shortly after, someone using the Wikileaks Twitter account—we have no idea if it was Assange—reached out to Guccifer and asked for the documents, arguing that they would have a much higher impact if they were released on Wikileaks. Guccifer obliged.

On July 22, 2016, three days before the Democratic National Convention, Wikileaks published more than 20,000 internal Democratic emails—just days after it had received them. This time, there would be no collaborations with newspapers, no careful vetting of the emails, just a huge document dump.

The emails revealed a clear bias preference among Democratic officials for Hillary Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders. While this didn’t stop her nomination, it forced chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to resign. It also sowed dissent within Democratic ranks, which would bode ill for November.

Four months later, on November 6, just two days before the election, Wikileaks published another trove of Democratic emails. 

Historians are still debating how much this affected the outcome, but Clinton’s lead over Trump in the polls began to shrink. Two days later, Trump eked out a narrow electoral college victory.

Obama’s term ended, and Trump’s began. Trump was openly praising Assange and Wikileaks. Assange’s chances of avoiding prosecution looked better and better.  

Then, in August 2017, Assange’s chances at freedom got another boost when Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny was forced to drop all charges against him. The statute of limitations had run out in 2015. By 2017, Ny decided that Assange’s asylum in the embassy made it impossible to prosecute him. 

Assange’s strategy of holing up in the embassy and waiting it out had worked.

But Assange still wasn’t free.

As much as Trump might have loved Assange, rank-and-file Republicans still held a grudge against him for publishing the Afghanistan and Iraq war reports and the State Department cables. When Trump took office, his attorney general Jeff Sessions said that arresting Assange was “still a priority.” The grand jury investigation continued. Assange had to remain in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Except Ecuador’s hospitality was running out.

Ecuador wasn’t happy that Assange was attempting to alter foreign elections from the sanctuary of its embassy. It briefly cut off Assange’s Internet access in October 2016 to show its displeasure.

Then In 2017, Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, was defeated by his vice president, Lenin Moreno. More conservative and hoping to improve his country’s relationship with the US, Moreno was less sympathetic to Assange’s situation.

Months after Moreno took power, Ecuador forced Assange to sign a contract that he wouldn’t issue any messages that could be seen as interfering with another country.

Assange managed to comply for only a few months, until he published a series of Tweets defending Russia. The embassy took away his Internet again, this time indefinitely.

Then it began revoking other privileges. Suddenly, he could only receive visitors at certain times of the day. His life was beginning to resemble solitary confinement.

With less contact with the outside world, Assange’s mental and physical health began to suffer. He became depressed and agitated.

In April 2019, he smeared his own feces on the walls of the embassy, in protest of his treatment. In response, Ecuador revoked his asylum status. English police were allowed into the embassy, and they arrested him for violating the terms of his bail back in 2012.

With Assange in English custody, the American grand jury was finally able to go public with its indictment of Julian Assange. The indictment was for one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, and 17 more charges related to espionage. Each espionage charge carried a maximum sentence of 10 years.

After his arrest in April 2019, Assange was taken to London’s Belmarsh prison. It’s nicknamed “England’s Guantanamo,” and it houses some of London’s most notorious criminals. Murderers. Rapists. Terrorists.

And now, Julian Assange.

After years of hiding from justice at the Ecuadorian embassy, justice had finally caught up with him. And now, he was at its mercy.

Act Four

Assange spent the next several months at Belmarsh Prison in solitary confinement. His mental condition deteriorated even more, and he was deemed a suicide risk. Finally, in February 2020, he was allowed to transfer to the general population…just in time for the COVID-19 quarantine to begin. 

Assange and Stella Moris continued their relationship and married in March 2022. Their marriage was as much a form of protest as it was about love. Meanwhile, his legal case continued to progress. 

In April 2022, a British court ruled that Assange can be extradited to the United States. His lawyers are currently appealing that decision, and he remains in legal limbo. If Assange is extradited, a potential US court case could happen as early as 2023. If convicted, he could face more than 170 years in prison.

While Assange awaits his fate, his actions still reverberate for himself, for those involved, and for the world at large. 

After Assange was arrested in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2019, Sweden reopened his rape case. However, six months later it would once again end the investigation. This time, it was because the evidence had “weakened” after nine years. 

Assange continues to claim that the accusations are false, either the product of personal jealousy or the result of an elaborate CIA scheme to discredit him.

Assange’s accusers, Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen, have never changed their stories, and maintain that Julian Assange sexually assaulted them.

We can’t tell the story of Julian Assange without telling the story of Chelsea Manning. Her story didn’t end after she was convicted. In fact, it was just beginning.

One month after her court martial in 2013, Manning publicly announced that she was transgender, and that she was going to begin her transition while in prison. She petitioned the military to provide health care related to her transition. When it refused, the ACLU sued on her behalf. At one point she carried out a hunger strike. Finally, in September 2016, Chelsea Manning became the first transgender inmate in US military history to be granted a request for gender reassignment surgery.

But before that would happen, after a sustained campaign from LGBTQ+ activist groups, President Obama commuted Manning’s sentence in 2017 and she was set free.

She had her surgery one year later.  

Wikileaks’ impact on world events is undeniable.

Today, it’s become commonplace for multiple newspapers to work together to publish sensitive documents to protect themselves, as seen with the Panama Papers and the Pandora Papers. Julian Assange and Wikileaks pioneered this practice by working with The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel to ensure that the US government couldn’t shut them down.

Before Assange founded Wikileaks, it was already known that the United States committed human rights abuses and war crimes while fighting the War on Terror. But Assange and Wikileaks’ gave the public the most comprehensive accounting of those abuses to date.

Early publications, like the Guantanamo Bay prisoner manual and the Battle of Fallujah report, contradicted what the military said publicly. The Afghanistan and Iraq war reports did the same, but on a grander scale.

Wikileaks’ most attention-grabbing publication was the Collateral Murder video. But the documents Wikileaks published afterwards chronicle thousands of Collateral Murders. Each one is horrifying. And in total, the documents tell the story of the wars in a way that no single document or video ever could. 

The Obama Administration ended the Iraq War in 2011 after years of public outcry, and just one year after Wikileaks published the Collateral Murder video and the Iraq War logs. Leaving Afghanistan would prove to be much trickier, and wouldn’t happen for another decade. 

Wikileaks reports have directly led to positive political changes in countries like Kenya, Iceland, Tunisia, the United States, and more. They’ve also led to countless firings of corrupt government officials and business people. The organization continues to operate today and it promises more leaks in the future.

But critics have accused Wikileaks of drifting away from its original mission to publish the truth, no matter what it might be. Instead, critics argue that Julian Assange has used Wikileaks for his own personal aims, like allying himself with Vladimir Putin to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. 

In 2017, following Donald Trump’s victory, Wikileaks opted not to publish 68 gigabytes of documents from the Russian Interior Ministry. This would have been potentially damaging to Putin’s regime. Observers saw this as further proof of Assange’s cozy relationship with Putin. Some have even accused Wikileaks of being a Russian intelligence operation, which the organization denies. 

And then, there’s Assange himself. He remains in legal limbo, but he continues to fight, and so do his supporters.

On October 8, 2022, over a thousand people will descend on the British Parliament. Once there, they’ll encircle the building, join hands, and form a “human chain.”

It’s a symbolic gesture, to protest Julian Assange’s upcoming extradition to the United States.

But it also shows Assange’s ability to gather support. After 12 years of constant government surveillance, calls for his assassination, rape allegations, and imprisonment, more than a thousand people are still willing to fight for what Assange stands for.

Julian Assange started out as a young and brilliant hacker in Melbourne who broke into computer systems because he felt information should be free.

Similarly, when he founded Wikileaks, he did it in the name of freedom of information. Julian Assange didn’t just set out to change journalism, he wanted to change the world. He wanted to shine a light on secrecy and hold the powerful accountable for their actions. There’s no denying that he did do just that. 

Julian Assange has been called many things: a freedom fighter, a victim, a puppet, a criminal, a publicity seeker, even an egomaniac.

In reality, he’s many of these things, and more. 

Assange sought to expose the truth. What he revealed is how complicated the truth can be. 

Credits

Thanks for listening to Modem Mischief. Don’t forget to hit the subscribe or follow button in your favorite podcast app right now so you don’t miss an episode. This show is an independent production and is wholly supported by you, our listeners and the best way to support the show is to share it. And another way to support us is on Patreon or a paid subscription on Apple Podcasts. For as little as $5 a month you’ll receive an ad-free version of the show plus monthly bonus episodes exclusive to subscribers. Modem Mischief is brought to you by Mad Dragon Productions and is created, produced and hosted by me: Keith Korneluk. This episode is written and researched by Jim Rowley. Edited, mixed and mastered by Greg Bernhard aka He Wears a Dress…But Not as a Disguise..But to be Seen. The theme song “You Are Digital” is composed by Computerbandit. Sources for this episode are available on our website at modemmischief.com. And don’t forget to follow us on social media at @modemmischief. Thanks for listening!