Assange’s greatest fear is anonymity

The truth is the Ecuadorians have grown tired of hosting Assange in their tiny Knightsbridge embassy. The man sometimes mocked as Cupboard Boy actually resides in a converted women’s toilet where he has a kitchenette, a treadmill, a bed and a desk.

It is not entirely dissimilar to a standard prison cell, albeit with internet access and while Assange and his rapidly dwindling coterie of supporters bleat about his incarceration there is no doubt it is entirely self-imposed.

In 2012, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa facilitated and supported Assange’s application for asylum.

Correa, a Hugo Chavez ally and member of the Latin America ‘pink’ leftist movement, had engaged in a form of international attention seeking, a sort of geopolitical ‘look at me’ exercise.

Correa was incapable of understanding Assange’s detention within the embassy would lead necessarily to a sharper international focus of political conditions within his own country (his government had a dismal record in terms of media control and routinely locked up journalists that failed to push the government line), limit trade opportunities with foreign countries, especially with the US and lead to a diplomatic impasse with the UK.

In May last year Lenín Moreno became President of Ecuador. While Moreno is cut from the same ideological cloth as his predecessor, he does not share Correa’s enthusiasm for Assange.

This is where we are now. The Ecuadorians want Assange out. They won’t get to the point of actually pushing him out the front door. They are seeking a negotiated settlement that will spare them further embarrassment. So, the first step was to seek diplomatic immunity for Assange which would allow him to leave the UK and not face charges there (an outstanding warrant exists for his arrest in the UK for jumping bail) or anywhere else.

This was a farcical attempt and the British Foreign Office quite rightly rejected it. Yesterday, Assange tweeted a photo of himself in a Ecuadorean soccer jumper and shortly afterwards, the Ecuadorean foreign minister, María Espinosa, announced he had become a citizen of Ecuador. This creates a mild complication for the British authorities but does not prevent his arrest should he make his way out of the embassy.

In 2015, the London Met withdrew its patrols of the immediate area, citing manpower and resource issues. In all probability Assange would get a couple of blocks down the road before the inevitable crash tackle. More likely, should the stalemate continue, he will be surreptitiously taken into custody with the tacit approval of the Ecuadorians.

Assange is said to fear arrest by US authorities and often tweets darkly about the existence of secret warrants. Whether they exist or not is unclear but late last year the US Attorney-General, Jeff Sessions, said the arrest of Assange had become “a priority.”

Assange is a wanted man for publishing the Iraq War and Afghan War documents leaks and perhaps the most damaging, the US Diplomatic cable leak in 2010 of which the US says threatened its national security. Obviously the US won’t say what assets were put at risk but the blythe manner in which Wikileaks published that material without due analysis, editorial or curatorial oversight, was an extraordinarily dangerous and callous exercise.

Since that time, many of Wikileaks personnel have departed, concerned at Assange’s ‘my way or the highway’ style, which is said to verge on the megalomaniacal. You might say that he is now relatively harmless but he retains significant support from dark forces around the globe.

The Steele dossier on Trump and Russia basically described Wikileaks as a Kremlin asset. Bear in mind that document is not designed to be a dot point version of gospel truth. Intelligence dossiers rely on second hand information, gossip and speculative theories posed by others.

In the context of the DNC email dump, it might be just as likely that Assange could argue he acted out of malice towards Hillary Clinton and given his reported hatred of the Clintons, that would be entirely credible.

But in 2012 Assange appeared on Russia today (RT), a propaganda channel that essentially regurgitates Putin and the Kremlin’s world view. A year later Wikileaks tweeted it had received hacked material that would embarrass the Russian government. It quickly walked the tweet back claiming it would only be embarrassing to some Russian companies. In any event it came to nothing. No document dump, no leak, nothing.

In April 2017, CIA Director Mike Pompeo (a Trump appointee) said of Assange and his organisation “It is time to call it out for what it really is — a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”

While Assange has rejected the Russian doormat tag, it’s safe to say that if Assange isn’t a Kremlin asset, he’s doing a very good impersonation of one. His supporters from seven years ago have dropped off because what Assange and Wikileaks claimed to be back then — freedom fighters earnestly engaged in the business of throwing light on the world’s dark secrets — has been revealed to be a partisan exercise based on the whims of the organisation’s leader.

He is right to fear arrest by the US but given his circumstances over the last five years it can’t be imprisonment he fears. He has become accustomed to confined spaces. A prison cell would not cause a sudden surge of claustrophobia.

The real reason Assange refuses to leave the Ecuadorean embassy and face justice is not incarceration but the ignominy and ultimately the anonymity a prison sentence will bring. Assange, the narcissistic scofflaw who once was a human headline, can’t abide the thought of becoming a nobody.

And that is really all you need to know about Julian Assange.

This article was published in The Australian on 12 January 2018.