Julian Assange's 20-year journey from Australian hacker to new-age media celebrity to wanted man to eternal prisoner to finally freedom has been much easier to caricature than to portray.
The lack of an agreed-upon label for Assange — whether he was a heroic fighter for truth or a reckless leaker who put lives at risk — makes assessing his achievements murky at best.
Whatever history's verdict on Assange, his appearance in a remote Pacific island courtroom on Wednesday where he pleaded guilty to one count of violating U.S. espionage laws was a fitting end to a story that has always seemed stranger than fiction.
Since founding WikiLeaks in 2006, the 52-year-old Assange has been a polarizing figure, using the internet to solicit and publish government secrets. His revelations, ranging from secret diplomatic cables to civilian deaths in the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have been courageous for those who believe in radical transparency. But they have been devastating for those who fear his disclosures could get people killed, even though there is no evidence that any lives were lost.
After incurring the wrath of the White House with his sensational leaks, Mr. Assange spent 12 years in London fighting extradition first to Sweden and then the United States, holed up in a South American embassy and then languishing in a British prison, and popping up in the headlines again as the courts ruled on his latest appeals. He became less a cutting-edge rebel and more a ghostly throwback to another era.
“Julian Assange has sacrificed many years for freedom of speech, freedom of the press,” Barry Pollack, the lawyer who represented Assange in his plea deal with U.S. authorities, said Wednesday in Canberra, Australia. “He sacrificed his freedom.”
At its best, WikiLeaks has shone a light on dark corners, often working with traditional media organizations to expose abuses such as extrajudicial killings in Kenya, and its documents on the misdeeds of Tunisia's ruling family were a harbinger of the upheaval that has swept the region.
Alan Rusbridger, a former editor-in-chief of the Guardian who worked extensively with Assange, said WikiLeaks was credited with accelerating the political change that came with the Arab Spring.
There is no doubt that Assange has changed history, but it is not clear whether he has done so in the way that he and his followers hoped when he first attracted global attention in 2010 with the WikiLeaks video of a Reuters cameraman killed in a U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad.
“Consider Julian Assange's motivations on Iraq and Afghanistan,” says PJ Crowley, who was a State Department spokesman when WikiLeaks released 250,000 classified diplomatic cables in 2010, a project WikiLeaks initially conducted in collaboration with The New York Times and others.
“We left Iraq, we came back, we're still there,” Crowley said. “After WikiLeaks, we stayed in Afghanistan for 10 years. His legacy is, knowingly or unwittingly, working with Russian intelligence and helping Russia get Donald Trump elected.”
Crowley's involvement with Assange is deeply personal: He was forced to resign after criticizing the Pentagon's handling of Chelsea Manning, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst who downloaded thousands of documents (including these cables) from classified government networks and uploaded them to WikiLeaks.
Assange's reputation suffered during the 2016 presidential election when WikiLeaks published Democratic emails that had been hacked by Russian intelligence, which supporters of Hillary Clinton cited as one of several factors that contributed to her defeat at the hands of Trump.
As secretary of state, Clinton had to apologize to foreign leaders after embarrassing details were included in cables U.S. diplomats sent to the State Department, and in one case, the foreign minister of a Persian Gulf state refused to allow anyone to take notes at a meeting with her, fearing that what she said would be leaked.
“Some of this damage to U.S. foreign policy is irreparable,” said Vali R. Nasr, a then-senior State Department official who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University. “You can apologize, but you can't undo it.”
But Mr. Nasr said the WikiLeaks furor also revealed something the United States later used to its advantage: the public relations value of intelligence. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, U.S. and British intelligence agencies declassified select materials about Russian activities to warn President Vladimir V. Putin and mobilize Western support.
U.S. authorities said the espionage charge against Assange was intended to deter other whistleblowers from leaking classified information, but it also reflected a public shock that the nation's most closely guarded secrets could be so easily leaked.
“Part of the push to go after Assange is about trying to address their own weaknesses by shooting the messenger,” Nasr said.
Emissaries proved hard to find: Mr. Assange's long exile in Britain, where he spent seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy and five in London's Belmarsh prison, transformed him from a daredevil media impresario into a stubborn but troubled resistance.
Supporters camped outside the embassy where he was granted asylum, holding signs and chanting “Free Assange!” Detractors saw him as a wayward propagandist. He claims to be a victim of political persecution and had breached the terms of his bail after losing an appeal against a Swedish arrest warrant on sexual assault charges, which he described as a “smear campaign” instigated by the United States.
Mr Assange held defiant press conferences in a cramped quarters converted from embassy offices, where activists and celebrities have made a name for themselves, including the actress Pamela Anderson, who has become something of a regular.
Assange began a secret relationship with Stella Morris, a lawyer who represented him and later became his wife, and the couple had two children while undercover in the embassy.
It was a costly and time-consuming mess for British authorities, who were caught in the middle and had to post police in front of the embassy while the court dealt with the extradition request.
Sweden later dropped its case against Assange, but the United States under President Donald J. Trump charged him with espionage. After Ecuador's change of government, he became an unwelcome guest and was kicked out of the embassy in April 2019. As police dragged him away, looking scruffy and bearded, he shouted, “Britain, resist! Resist this attempt by the Trump administration.”
At that point, the Assange story had become little more than a sideshow. “Journalists weren't paying enough attention to Assange's plight,” Rusbridger said. “People see him as either a savior or a devil. There's nothing in between.”
Assange was given a 50-week sentence for breaching bail and will spend five years in Belmarsh, the maximum security prison once home to terrorist Abu Hamza al-Masri, also known as “Hellmarsh” for its harsh conditions.
As Assange challenges his deportation from Britain, his case has moved slowly from court to court, at times feeling endless, as his lawyers appeal adverse rulings.
“Our procedural rules don't really lend themselves to a quick resolution,” said Nick Vamos, a partner at British law firm Peters & Peters and a former head of extradition at the Crown Prosecution Service. “If he wanted to raise all the issues, that was entirely his right, but that would buy him a lot of time.”
Assange also scored a victory: last month he won a full appeal against his extradition order after a judge found that US guarantees did not adequately address concerns about protecting his rights.
While a plea deal with the US may have started to take shape earlier, Vamos believes the decision “brought people to the table and started discussing a concrete agreement”.
As the courtroom maneuvering reached its climax, several people were able to see Assange in prison, including Rebecca Vincent, campaigns director for Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom group that has been campaigning for Assange's release since 2019. Vincent said she visited Assange six times between August 2023 and last month and was concerned about his well-being.
“This is never an easy situation and of course we were concerned about his mental state,” Vincent said, “but he was still Julian and he was still fighting.”
Vincent said that after talking with Assange and his family, she expected his priority would be to spend time with them — his two sons only know their father through prison visits. She saw his release as a victory but said it should have ended with all charges being dropped.
Press freedom advocates agree that even if Assange is released, the plea deal sets a troubling precedent.
Jameel Jaffer, director of Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute, said the deal averted “a worst-case scenario for press freedom” but meant that Assange “will now face five years in prison for the work that journalists do every day.”
In Canberra, an emotional Assange kissed his wife after returning home, while his lawyer, Mr Pollack, said: “Hopefully this is not only the end of the case against Julian Assange, but the end of the case against journalism.”