WikiLeaks (20 page)

On the other hand, if Megrahi was allowed to die in a Scottish prison (the fragments of the plane had fallen on a Scottish town, and Scotland had its own legal system) then Muammar Gaddafi, the megalomaniac ruler of Libya, was threatening dire commercial reprisals. The British ambassador was privately warning that UK interests could be “cut off at the knees”. It was the crucial truth no British politician wanted to come clean about in public.

The British administration in London managed to push the decision for Megrahi’s release – and the subsequent blame for it – on to the autonomous government in Scotland. The Scottish nationalist politicians complained bitterly to the US that they had got nothing out of the deal. The US diplomats recorded privately that it served the Scot Nats right for getting out of their depth. The Americans also noted their own suspicions that the Scots might have been in effect bribed with the offer of Qatari trade loans to let Megrahi out (both parties vociferously denied it) and that Tony Blair, when prime minister, might have cynically promised leniency for Megrahi in return for lucrative British oil deals. (The British equally vociferously denied that accusation.)

The cables left the British looking ineffectual: they failed to prevent Gaddafi’s son Saif from arranging an embarrassing hero’s welcome for Megrahi, although celebrations were somewhat toned down. And UK intelligence was so weak that diplomats were wringing their hands over the prospect of a public Megrahi funeral the following year – but on the basis of false information, duly passed on to the US, that he was now due to die any minute.

The cables also disclosed that the Americans spoke with forked tongues. While it was left to US domestic politicians to huff angrily about Libyan perfidy, the state department signalled that Gaddafi might be co-opted to help hunt down al-Qaida fundamentalists. And the Libyan ruler was continuing to dismantle his would-be nuclear arsenal, even if Hillary Clinton had to personally sign a grovelling letter to mollify one of his massive sulks.

This particular sulk came about, the cables revealed, when Gaddafi, who appeared at the UN accompanied everywhere by a “voluptuous blonde Ukrainian nurse”, flew into a rage at the derisive reception accorded to his lengthy general assembly speech. His pique was compounded by US refusal to let him pitch his iconic Bedouin-style tent in New York. Gaddaffi vented his ire, it transpired, by suddenly refusing to allow a “hot” shipment of highly enriched uranium be loaded on a transport plane and shipped back to Russia, as part of his nuclear-dismantling agreement. US diplomats and experts warned in terrified tones of a radioactive calamity, as the uranium container sat for a month, unguarded and in danger of heating up and cracking open.

This picture that emerged of US diplomatic dealings with Libya was thus richly textured and fascinating. It showed a superpower at work: cajoling, fixing, eavesdropping, manoeuvring and sometimes bullying. It also showed the dismayingly crazed attitudes of a foreign ruler possessing both nuclear ambitions and a lucrative reservoir of the world’s oil – a truth which his own subjects would rarely be allowed to see. And, from the point of view of a domestic British reporter, it showed how limited the options open to the UK seemed to be despite its pretensions to punch above its weight in the world.

These documents had to be treated carefully, Leigh realised. Some of the informants who described Gaddafi’s idiosyncrasies would clearly have to have their identities protected. Although the cables themselves were obviously genuine, it did not mean that the analysis and gossip reported therein were also always correct. And one had to bear in mind that the authors of these dispatches to Washington also had their own agendas. They wanted to impress. They wanted to promote their own views. Sometimes they simply wanted to demonstrate that they knew what was going on: diplomats, like journalists, were all too capable of turning a shallow lunch with a “contact” into a hot story, for career-enhancing reasons.

Nevertheless, with all these caveats, it was clear that America’s secret diplomatic dealings over Libya were immensely revelatory. They were not only newsworthy, but also important. This was a picture of the world seen through a much less scrambled prism than usual. And there were more than another 100 countries to go! Leigh was plunging once more into the database bran-tub when his landline suddenly rang, breaking into the silence of the surrounding Highland hills. It was his London colleague Nick Davies, with a bewildering message. It was one that threatened to derail the entire WikiLeaks enterprise. “Julian’s about to be arrested in Sweden!” he said “He’s being accused of rape.”

Sonja Braun’s flat, Stockholm
Friday 13 August 2010

“
Sonja tried a number of times to reach for a condom, but Assange stopped her by holding her arms and pinning her legs
”
B
RAUN TESTIMONY
, S
WEDISH POLICE DOSSIER

The revelation that Julian Assange had been accused of rape came as a bombshell. In a series of frantic overseas phone calls, Leigh and Davies attempted to piece together a history of the disastrous sexual collisions that occurred in that Nordic high summer, which would eventually lead to Swedish prosecutors pursuing extradition of Assange from Britain to face questioning over allegations of sexual misconduct. No one had anticipated this.

One thing is clear: on present evidence Julian Assange is absolutely not a rapist as the term is understood by many – that is, he does not practise, nor is he accused of, the premeditated and brutal sexual violence that the word “rapist” evokes in tabloid headlines.

But during his time in London, Assange did often seem to have a restlessly predatory attitude towards women. It contrasted with his otherwise cool demeanour. Assange’s behaviour once
even caused his own blonde lawyer, Jennifer Robinson from the firm of Finers Stephens Innocent, to blush brick-red. Gathered at the head of the stairs inside the
Guardian
building, a group of hungry reporters, with Assange and a number of his legal team, were debating plans to go out and eat. “Shall we take the lawyers with us?” a journalist asked. Assange leered at Robinson and said, “Let’s just take the pretty one.”

A WikiLeaks staffer confided later: “We’ve simply had to tell Julian he must stop making sexually inappropriate remarks.” Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir, one of several exasperated women, said, charitably, that it was important to bear in mind the culture Assange came from. She told the online
Daily Beast
: “Julian is brilliant in many ways, but he doesn’t have very good social skills … and he’s a classic Aussie in the sense that he’s a bit of a male chauvinist.”

Men like Assange, who refer to women as “hotties”, hail from the land of coarse jokes about the one-eyed trouser snake – a considerable contrast to sober Swedes, who are well-advanced in their understanding of women’s sexual rights.

The stage was thus set in Sweden for an ambiguous – and, as it proved, highly controversial – encounter.

On Wednesday 11 August Assange flew in from London. That evening he dined out at the Beirut Café, a Lebanese restaurant in north Stockholm, one of a party of five. Present were 56-year-old Donald Böstrom, the Swedish journalist who was WikiLeaks’ local connection, and his wife. The other pair round the table were Russ Baker, a US reporter with cropped grey hair who last year published a controversial book about the Bush family, and a woman friend with whom Baker was travelling. Assange made such a brazen, though unsuccessful, play for this latter woman, according to those present, that a row broke out. “Assange and
Baker actually ended up squaring up to each other outside the restaurant,” says one of those closely involved.

Böstrom says he felt uneasy for his celebrity friend. He warned Assange that his behaviour was a security risk, for “he would not be the first great man to be brought down by a woman in a short skirt”. Böstrom says that he could see that Assange’s notoriety and evident courage were proving remarkably attractive to women: “There’s a bit of the rock star phenomenon about it. The world’s most famous man, in some people’s eyes. Really intelligent – and that’s attractive – and he takes on the Pentagon. That’s impressive to many. I could say the majority of women who come in contact with him fall completely. They become bewitched.”

Friday the 13th lived up to its reputation, at least as far as Assange was concerned. When his trip began, the celebrity leaker was staying in the suburb of Sodermalm, in an unoccupied Stockholm flat belonging to Sonja Braun (not her real name), a politically active 31-year-old official of the Brotherhood movement, a Christian group affiliated to the large Social Democrat party. Braun is a slim, dark-haired feminist who speaks English and was previously an equality officer at a top Swedish university. It was Braun who invited Assange to come to Sweden and give a seminar, and indeed she seems to have specifically arranged that Assange should sleep at her flat. Significantly, that flat has only one room and only one bed, say Assange’s lawyers.

Before Assange’s arrival, Braun called Böstrom, the journalist recalls. “We had never met before, and she says: ‘Hello, my name is Sonja Braun and I’m planning this seminar and I’ll be away on a business trip and my flat will be empty and Julian could stay there. Would you suggest it?’ It would be cheaper for the Brotherhood movement, who wouldn’t need to pay hotel bills, and Julian would rather live in a flat than in a hotel, so I suggest it and he jumps at it. So I put the two of them together. I’m the middleman, so to speak. The idea was that Julian would live there up to
the Friday, I think. The seminar was on Saturday. Sonja was supposed to return on the Saturday.”

Braun decided to come back a day early, however. At this point, accounts begin to diverge. Assange’s lawyers supplied a brisk chronology to a later London court hearing, saying: “Braun arrives without explanation, takes him to dinner and invites him to bed. She supplies a condom and they have intercourse several times.” The lawyers add tartly: “Early morning: Braun takes photograph of Julian asleep in her bed (unauthorised), later posted on the internet.”

A rather different version was later given to police by Braun herself. According to her, it was a tale of a night of bad sex, with one peculiar twist. The police document recorded:

“As they sat drinking tea, Assange stroked Sonja’s leg. Sonja has stated that at no point earlier in the evening had Assange attempted to press any physical attentions on her, which Sonja initially welcomed. Then, according to Sonja it all went very quickly. Assange was heavy-handed and impatient. He pulled off her clothes and at the same time snapped her necklace. Sonja tried to put on some articles of clothing as it was going too quickly and uncomfortably but Assange ripped them off again. Sonja says that she didn’t want to go any further but that it was too late to stop Assange as she had gone along with it so far. She says that she felt she only had herself to blame, and so she allowed Assange to take off her clothes.”

This vigorous wooing does not sound out of character. Another woman in London who got involved with Assange around the same time told the authors: “I kissed him. Then he started trying to rip my dress off. That was his approach.”

Braun’s complaints went further, however. According to the statement, she realised he was trying to have unprotected sex with her. “She tried to wriggle her hips and cross her legs to stop penetration. Braun tried a number of times to reach for a condom but
Assange stopped her by holding her arms and pinning her legs and continued to try and enter her without a condom. Braun says that she was on the verge of tears and couldn’t get hold of a condom and thought, ‘This is going to end badly.’

“After a while, Assange asked Sonja what it was she was reaching out for and why she was crossing her legs and she said she wanted him to put a condom on … Assange had by now released her arms and put on a condom that Sonja gave him. Sonja says she felt there was an unspoken resistance from Assange which gave her the idea that he didn’t like being told to do things.”

Braun told the police that at some stage Assange had “done something” with the condom that resulted in it becoming ripped, and ejaculated without withdrawing.

When he was later interviewed by police in Stockholm, Assange agreed that he had had sex with Braun but said he did not tear the condom. He told police that he had continued to sleep in her bed for the following week and she had never mentioned a torn condom.

At 9.30 the following morning, according to the Assange camp, a journalist called to collect Assange for the lecture. “He is amazed to find Braun there.” She herself seemed embarrassed, and actually denied having had sex with him. Böstrom told police: “When someone asked, she joked that Julian was living in her flat and was sleeping in her bed, but that they hadn’t had sex. She said that he tried, but she refused.” Much later, according to Böstrom, she sheepishly confessed that she did in fact have sex with Assange. Her explanation: “I was really proud of having the world’s most famous man in my bed, and living in my flat.”

At Assange’s 11am seminar, on the WikiLeaks theme that “Truth is the first casualty of war”, Sonja Braun can be seen onstage in video footage. She appeared businesslike, if somewhat subdued.

Böstrom himself was beginning to wonder. At lunch after the seminar, he noted that Braun and Assange were chatting in
intimate tones: “She told me, laughing, that he was a strange guy who got up in the middle of the night to work on his laptop, and she’s quite jokey about this. But then at the party she’s sitting next to Julian and takes it up again … ‘Were you awake last night?’ she says. And she says, ‘I woke up and you had got out of bed, and I felt abandoned.’ And it was just that word that caught my attention. Why did she feel abandoned if they weren’t …” His account tails off and changes direction. “Peter Weiderud [a Brotherhood official] says it’s crayfish time in Sweden and Julian is here from abroad, so he should try Swedish crayfish.” Braun then dutifully tweeted, at 2pm, “Julian wants to go to a crayfish party. Anyone have a couple of available seats tonight or tomorrow?” The party was eventually arranged at her own flat at 7pm.