WikiLeaks: a True History

The last day of June 2010 was the first day of a momentous three day gathering at the Guardian offices in London. WikiLeaks boss Julian Assange was meeting up with five journalists - John Goetz from Germany’s Der Spiegel, Eric Schmitt from the New York Times, and the Guardian’s David Leigh, Nick Davies and Rob Evans - to examine the leaked material that would later be known as the Afghan War Logs (originally the "Afghan War Diary"). Their meeting room soon became the highly secretive new project’s "bunker".

According to John Goetz, they also wanted to "come up with a plan on how to coordinate journalistic cooperation between the partners."

Assange was concerned by how much high-level pressure WikiLeaks had received after the publishing of "Collateral Murder". He felt that it would be safer to partner with established media organisations in order to release the rest of the Manning leaks, but he only wanted to work with journalists he could trust. There was a clear benefit to the media organisations involved: exclusive access to a treasure trove of leaks, with journalists from various regions publishing explosive stories related to their own countries. In return, WikiLeaks expected these journalists to help sift through the mountains of data, and publish their articles responsibly. As John Goetz said:

Goetz said this careful approach to redaction was "understood and agreed by all the media partners" and efforts to keep the data secure were "more extreme…​ than I had ever previously observed as a journalist". He said someone from the Guardian put the complex US military database content into a Microsoft Excel format, making it easier to read, but the work was still "extraordinarily demanding".

Prior to the release, Eric Schmitt of the New York Times contacted the White House for comment. He later emailed Goetz to say the Obama administration had requested that WikiLeaks and their partners redact the names of informants and withhold 15,000 documents from publication. WikiLeaks subsequently noted on their release page:

The plan was for all the media partners to publish at the same time (so that the US government could not signal out one organisation to blame) with stories linking back to the verifiable data on the WikiLeaks website. But Goetz said Der Spiegel and the Guardian ended up publishing before WikiLeaks:

On 25 July 2010, WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Diary: 75,000 documents (of the original 91,000) covering a period between January 2004 and December 2009. Julian Assange called it "the most comprehensive history of a war ever to be published, during the course of the war - in other words, at a time when they still have a chance of doing some good." He said the leaked documents would "change our perspective on not only the war in Afghanistan, but on all modern wars."

A Guardian editorial called the leaks an "unvarnished picture" of a nine year old war that "cannot be won like this":

The leaks also revealed incidents of child prostitution by US Defence contractors, and psychological warfare waged via Afghan media outlets.

In the months ahead of this release, President Obama had ordered a contoversial "surge" of new US forces in Afghanistan. He blamed his predecessor, President Bush, for the chaos the leaks revealed:

The White House also claimed that WikiLeaks had "made no effort to contact the US government about these documents." This simply was not true: the media partners had agreed that the New York Times should handle discussions with the US government "because if all the partners contacted the White House independently, there would be chaos".

The US government further claimed that the disclosure of this classified information "puts the lives of the US and partner service members at risk and threatens our national security". This claim would be repeated endlessly for years to come, but no solid proof of harm was ever supplied. A letter from US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, dated 16 August 2010 but only revealed months later, admitted that the documents leaked by the WikiLeaks did not in fact jeopardize any US intelligence or sensitive military operations.

When US prosecutors ended up in court years later, they could not point to a single incident where anyone had been harmed as a result of WikiLeaks publications. They noted that the Taliban had responded to the release of the Afghan War Logs by publicly stating that they were reviewing the leaks to identify spies whom they could “punish". Assange dryly responded that this that was entirely expected, and that is why names had been redacted. A Senate Committee on Armed Services reported in August 2010 that “the review to date has not revealed any sensitive sources and methods compromised by disclosure”. And in October 2010 a senior NATO official in Kabul told CNN that there had not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the leak.

Within days of the Afghan War Logs release, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates phoned FBI Director Robert Mueller and asked the FBI to assist in their investigation of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. WikiLeaks said the US Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service was also involved in the investigation.

On the following day, WikiLeaks added an AES-encrypted "insurance file" to the Afghan War Diary page. The 1.4 GigaByte file, with a timestamp of 31 December 2010, was twenty times larger than the just-released Afghan War documents. Cryptographers said it would be virtually impossible to crack unless WikiLeaks revealed the password. Within weeks, the file had been downloaded over 100,000 times, and WikiLeaks was boasting over 100,000 followers on Twitter alone.

On the same day (29 July 2010) Britain’s House of Commons announced that they would hold two inquiries into the Afghan War:

In media interviews, Julian Assange bristled at claims he had "blood on his hands".

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In the Washington Post newspaper, former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen, a senior member of the Neoconservative "American Enterprise Institute", branded WikiLeaks “a criminal enterprise” and urged the military to hunt them down like terrorists. In retrospect, his article set out a roadmap which US administrations largely maintained for the following decade.

Thiessen said the USA should pressure foreign governments to "cooperate in bringing Assange to justice".

He cited a 1989 memorandum from the US Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel as proof that this would be legal: "we do not need permission to apprehend Assange or his co-conspirators anywhere in the world".

Karl Rove, Bush’s former Senior Advisor, applauded Thiessen’s article and challenged President Obama to "stop WikiLeaks". He said he wanted Assange "hunted down and grabbed". Michigan Congressman Mike Rogers, a Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said Private Manning should be executed if it was proved she leaked the documents to WikiLeaks.

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WikiLeaks staff were now being actively targeted by the US government. In early June 2010, Assange was scheduled to join Daniel Ellsberg on stage in New York but appeared via Skype from Australia instead, saying lawyers recommended he not return to the USA. On 11 June 2010 The Daily Beast reported that Pentagon investigators were trying to determine his whereabouts.

Assange cancelled his appearance at the Las Vegas conference due to security concerns, but was still scheduled to deliver the keynote speech at a a major New York conference called Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE). On the day before the Wikileaks Editor in Chief was scheduled to speak, five Homeland Security agents appeared at the conference.

Instead of Julian Assange, the federal agents in New York got to hear 27-year-old Jacob Appelbaum, a US citizen and close confidant of Assange, who later said he had been "working with WikiLeaks for about three months". Appelbaum’s speech was a perfect example of his scathing humour and passionate concern:

After the speech, Appelbaum slipped out a backstage door, using a decoy to distract the federal agents, and went straight to the airport, where he boarded a flight to Berlin two hours later. When he returned to the USA on 29 July 2010, Appelbaum was detained by US customs officers at Newark Liberty airport. Officials photocopied his receipts, confiscated his phones and laptop, then interrogated him for three hours. Pressed for information on Assange and WikiLeaks, or his opinions on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Appelbaum refused to talk.

Meanwhile, Julian Assange had made a surprise appearance on stage at a TED Talk in Oxford, where he received a standing ovation. Host Chris Anderson asked Assange if it was true that WikiLeaks in recent months had "released more classified documents than the rest of the world’s media combined".

Assange repeated that he did not know if Chelsea Manning was WikiLeaks' source.

Nevertheless, WikiLeaks continued urging public support for Manning.

At about the same time, FBI agents were in Wales, raiding the house of Manning’s seriously ill mother, who had speech difficulties following a stroke four years earlier. The story was only revealed a month later.

Assange later stated that it was this FBI raid that motivated his decision to go and visit Sweden: "the FBI was here in the UK, stomping around the UK, and we thought I’d better get out."

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Even prior to the Afghan War Logs release, WikiLeaks was still busy fending off mounting public criticism. The Wau Holland Foundation in Germany was forced to clarify how they handled donations to Wikileaks. And Assange, who had just been rated the 58th Most Powerful Person in Global Media, continued demanding more from his media colleagues.

"Journalism should be more like science," he told one Guardian interviewer (who then described Assange as "a bit odd…​ cadaverous…​ like Andy Warhol").

Assange complained that journalists all too frequently burned their sources without taking any personal risks. Rather provocatively, he compare the death rate of Western journalists with media casualties in more authoritarian regimes:

On the other hand, Assange rushed to support responsible and courageous journalism. When a Professor of Law at Kings College unfairly attacked the BBC over their handling of the Trafigura affair, Assange publicly humiliated him on stage.

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A Pew Reseach poll conducted between 29 July and 1 August 2010 found that younger US citizens were more likely to approve of WikiLeaks disclosing classified material. Pew reported that "attention to news from Afghanistan spiked following the WikiLeaks report, with 34% following Afghanistan reports very closely, up from 22% the previous week. This is the highest interest in Afghanistan news since December 2009."

41% of respondents said the Afghan War Logs had received too little US media coverage in a week where Chelsea Clinton’s wedding had dominated the headlines.

On 3 August 2010 a USA Today/Gallup poll showed a dramatic 12 percent fall in public support for President Obama’s handling of the Afghan war:

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These political shifts vindicated Chelsea Manning’s decision to turn whistle-blower - but who was going to tell her about them? While the polls above were being conducted, Manning was being transferred from her hot prison cage in Kuwait to the US Marines' Quantico detention facility in Virginia. Guards in Kuwait had claimed that she had made a noose from her bedsheets, and repeatedly banged her head against the cage (she later could not remember this) so they placed her on suicide watch and prescribed anti-depression and anti-anxiety drugs. She remained on suicide watch in maximum security conditions at Quantico, but initially thought things were getting better:

In fact Manning would endure conditions amounting to torture for another nine months at Quantico: a guard stationed permanently outside her 6ft by 8ft (180cm by 240cm) cell; a toilet with no toilet paper (she had to shout for it when needed); only 20 minutes per day outside the cell, in full restraint (hands cuffed to a leather belt, legs in irons); nights spent under observation in fluorescent light, with guards regularly banging on the door for "security checks".

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The release of the Afghan War Logs was still causing absurd levels of chaos in Washington. Voice of America employees were told that they were not allowed to read or e-mail any of the WikiLeaks material on their government computers - even though they were expected to report on it! US soldiers were also ordered not to read or share WikiLeaks documents, with the US Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corp insisting that the leaked information remained officially classified - even though it was now in the public domain. And Democrat Senators Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, who were drafting new legislation to protect journalists from revealing sources, hurriedly authored amendments to ensure that such protection would never be afforded to WikiLeaks.

Not everyone was unhappy with the new leaks. As Daniel Ellsberg told CNN’s Larry King:

The US Department of Defence ominously threatened to take action against WikiLeaks if they did not return the leaked data:

WikiLeaks tweeted that the threat was "obnoxious". They said journalists were being fooled by the Pentagon’s "rhetorical tricks" about their lack of "direct" contact with the US government (after WikiLeaks media partners had agreed to let the New York Times handle contact), and the White House had refused their offer to help redact documents. They also complained that their media partners were not helping with redactions.

This was a sly reference to behind-the-scenes negitiations as WikiLeaks worked on their next big release, the Iraq War Logs (see below). WikiLeaks was demanding more time to redact documents. According to Der Spiegel’s John Goetz, their media partners were irritated by the delay.

On 2 August 2010, senior Guardian editor David Leigh sent the following email to Goetz:

With the benefit of hindsight, this media frustration is supremely ironic: Leigh was just one of many journalists who later falsely accused Assange of "putting lives in danger" by publishing unredacted documents.

What to do? WikiLeaks retweeted a follower who seemed to have the best response: lives were being lost every day on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan; perhaps the best WikiLeaks could do was publish and be damned.

On 12 August 2010, Assange appeared via Skype at an event hosted by London’s Frontline Club: "How WikiLeaks Is Changing Journalism". Tensions between WikiLeaks and its media partners were immediately apparent. Assange said the New York Times' portrayal of Chelsea Manning was "disgusting". He said WikiLeaks were still only "half way" through the process of redacting the remaining the 15,000 documents that had been withheld from the Afghan War Logs release.

The Guardian’s Simon Rogers said they had thought "long and hard" about publishing the raw data but "on the legal side we are based in London and you can find us." Media lawyer Mark Stephens suggested the Guardian might need to restructure, like WikiLeaks, moving key resources to more "sympathetic jurisdictions" such as Iceland.

Assange asked how the world’s media was planning to respond to the Pentagon’s recent threats against WikiLeaks:

Within ten days the answer would be obvious. WikiLeaks was about to be hit with a bombshell. And the world’s media would soon have a perfect excuse to desert Assange en masse.

Until August 2010, the WikiLeaks website was hosted by a Swedish company called PRQ, which provided "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services". In keeping with the anarchistic approach to a free Internet, PRQ recorded "almost no information about its clientele" and maintained "few if any of its own logs". Julian Assange still believed that Swedish laws guaranteed the world’s most secure Internet hosting, but he wanted to move WikiLeaks to another Swedish Internet Service Provider named Bahnhof, who housed their servers in the Pionen facility, a former underground nuclear fall-out shelter. Assange was also planning to apply for Swedish residency ahead of WikiLeaks’ Iraq War Logs publication.

But on the morning of 21 August 201, Julian Assange woke up in Stockholm to find himself branded a "Double Rapist" on media front pages around the world. So how did that happen?

On 11 August 2010, Assange landed in the Swedish capital to give a speech and negotiate a deal with Bahnhof. He was invited by a woman named Anna Ardin to stay at her apartment, which she said would be empty. Assange later explained that they had been introduced by "political contacts in Sweden". So who was Anna Ardin? According to Rundle:

Ardin had also worked with US-backed opposition groups in Cuba and Miami, fleeing from Havana after being threatened with deportation for "subversivee activities", and wrote anti-Castro articles for a US-linked publication in Sweden.

Two nights after Assange arrived, on Friday 13 August, Ardin returned home but told Assange he was welcome to stay. She had consensual sex with him that night. Ardin later told police that a condom had broken during sex but Assange had continued having sex with her, against her wishes. Assange told police that she had never mentioned this to him, and that they had continued having intercourse the next morning and the next day. Ardin continued happily socialising with Assange for days, and insisted he stay at her house, despite other offers of accommodation.

On Saturday 14 August, Assange gave a speech at Stockholm’s Trade Union Headquarters, where Ardin acted as his press secretary. She later tweeted that Assange wanted to attend a late night crayfish party. In the early hours of Sunday morning she tweeted from the party:

Five days later, these tweets had mysteriously been deleted.

Ardin later tweeted (in Swedish on 22 April 2013) that she was "not raped". That tweet was also deleted.

Another Swedish woman, Sofia Wilén, was in the front row of the Trade Union HQ audience on Saturday, wearing a pink cashmere sweater and taking photos of Assange. During Assange’s speech, according to text messages later produced by Assange’s lawyers, Wilén texted a friend: "He looked at me!" Wilén later told police she had become interested in Assange after seeing him on TV.

Witnesses said that following Assange’s speech, Sofia Wilén pressured her way to an invite to the post-event lunch, where she flirted with Assange, who later said "one of the organizers stated that she was a volunteer for their organisation although they would later claim that this was not true". After lunch, Wilén and Assange went to an IMAX cinema together and "canoodled". Assange said she "kissed me and placed my hands on her breasts. She asked whether I was staying with [Anna Ardin] and seemed concerned by it in a manner that I found strange."

Two days later, on Monday August 16th 2010, Assange and Wilén caught a train from Stockholm’s central station to her flat in Enköping. Assange’s bank cards had been frozen, so Wilén paid for his ticket. They had consensual sex and Assange stayed the night, believing he was in a secure location even though Wilén "knew an unusual amount of detail about me".

The next morning, according to Rundle’s version, "something happened".

According to Assange:

On Tuesday 17 August, Ardin allegedly texted a friend who was looking for Assange: “He’s not here. He’s planned to have sex with the cashmere girl every evening, but not made it. Maybe he finally found time yesterday?”

After having sex with Julian Assange, Sofia Wilén told friends that she was worried about the possibility of contracting a Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD). She phoned Ardin’s house, reportedly trying to contact Assange, and the two women began exchanging information. Ardin then introduced Wilén to a friend, Irmeli Krans, who was a former council election colleague and a campaigning feminist police officer. Like Ardin, Krans was also a member of Sweden’s Social Democratic party (this will be important later).

On Friday 20 August, Assange says he phoned Wilén because a friend said she was in hospital and wanted to talk to him. She asked him to meet her and get tested for an STD infection but "I was busy that day attempting to deal with the escalating political and legal threats against me from the Pentagon". Assange offered to get tested the following day (Saturday) but Wilén said she would go to the police and force him to get tested if he did not come to the hospital. After further discussion, Assange said she had agreed to meet at lunch the next day, when he agreed to get tested.

So what happened? After speaking on the phone with Assange on 20th August, Wilén went to Klara Police Station with Anna Ardin and policewoman Irmeli Krans, purportedly to force Julian to take an AIDS test. But Wilén said she was "shocked" and "railroaded" by police. Contrary to normal police procedures, Anna Ardin was allowed to sit in throughout Wilén’s police interview, which was also not video recorded (as per police recommendations) although a police report was produced.

Krans prepared a statement accusing Assange of rape but Wilén refused to sign it. The police report said she was "upset" by the rape accusation and left the station.

Wilén allegedly texted a friend at 14.25 on 20 August: “I did not want to put any charges against JA but the police wanted to get a grip on him.” At 17.26 another text said she was “shocked when they arrested JA because I only wanted him to take a test”. And the next day: “it was the police who fabricated the charges”.

These text messages were recorded by Swedish police but never made public. Assange’s lawyers were never given a copy but were "permitted to see them at the police station and able to note down a number of them":

Next day, Saturday 21 August, Ardin made her own statement to the police. When asked to provide additional evidence, Ardin allegedly returned to the police station with a torn condom (which would by then have been over a week old). Police later tested the condom and found it had no traces of genomic DNA. In other words, it had never been used.

Most of the details above were never revealed to the public by global media organisations who rushed to condemn Assange as a "rapist" and a "fugitive from justice". The damage to Julian Assange’s reputation - and WikiLeaks' public standing - was huge, immediate, long-lasting, and monumentally distracting from their other work. As Assange later complained, normal Swedish protections of privacy were simply thrown out the door:

WikiLeaks attempted to push back against the avalanche of negative press. On 21 August they released an "official statement about the latest hot topic".

WikiLeaks also tweeted: "We were warned to expect 'dirty tricks.' Now, we have the first one." This tweet was later deleted, after complaints that it was not respectful to the women involved.

Facing a barrage of questions, the Swedish Prosecution Authority published a FAQ saying that Assange’s information had reached news media "in a way that the authority does not know" and the prosecutor’s office "merely confirmed the information". Observers wondered why prosecutors had not given journalists the standard "no comment" response.

Then another amazing thing happened. On the next day, Sunday 22 August 2010, the Swedish case against Assange was abruptly closed. Swedish authorities cancelled the warrant for Julian Assange’s arrest.

A former Swedish chief prosecutor, Sven-Erik Alhem, said the the actions of the prosecutors were "bizarre and confusing":

In an equally bizarre TV interview, a spokeswoman for the Swedish Prosecution Authority insisted that no mistakes had been made and the case had been closed because "new evidence" had emerged. But while the arrest warrant had made global headlines, the "new evidence" supposedly proving Assange’s innocence was kept secret. Al Jazeera’s host asked if it was "normal procedure to accuse someone of rape and then two hours later say no, it’s not the case?"

In a 23 August 2010 interview with Al Jazeera, Julian Assange seemed similarly bemused.

But a minute later Assange stated: "I did not say this was part of a smear campaign". And then moments later: "Clearly it is a smear campaign of some kind because the material was quickly dropped within six hours."

Meanwhile, according to the texts provided by Assange’s lawyers, Anna Ardin was urging Sofia Wilén to go public with her story so they could "shape public opinion" (the women’s identities were still secret: only Assange’s identity had been revealed). Ardin texted that they ought to sell their stories for money to a newspaper. Elections were being held in Sweden on 19 September 2010, and Ardin was (for the second time) seeking election to the Stockholm City Council as a Social Democrat party candidate. No doubt the extra publicity would have helped her campaign.

On 26 August, Chief Prosecutor Eva Finne repeated emphatically that the evidence provided did not constitute a crime and the case was closed:

Then another bizarre thing happened. The next day, Friday 27 August 2010, a full two weeks after Assange first had sex with Ardin, a high profile Social Democrat politician named Claes Borgström was appointed counsel for the two women: he applied to re-open the investigation with a new prosecutor in the Swedish city of Gothenberg (nearly 400 km from Stockholm). On the following day, the two women allegedly confirmed by text that their new lawyer had negotiated a contract with Sweden’s biggest tabloid.

Borgström was also running as a Social Democrat party candidate at the coming elections, and could have become a government cabinet member if his party had won (national and local elections are held simultaneously in Sweden). According to Rundle, Claes Borgström was "not only the Social Democratic Party’s gender equality spokesperson, but a major driver of Sweden’s Sexual Offences Act 2005". And the new prosecutor, Marrianne Ny, was a sex crime expert who "had headed a crime development unit whose brief was to explore ways in which sex crime law might be changed or extended". There were clearly political and career gains to be reaped from the high profile Assange case.

Although WikiLeaks staff and media partners were still working on their next big release, Julian Assange cancelled his other commitments and remained in Sweden for five weeks, until 27 September 2010, when his lawyer said he had legal permission to leave the country. Nevertheless, for years to come, critics would falsely claim that Assange "fled Sweden to escape sex charges".

Assange gave an interview to Swedish police on 30 August 2010 in relation to Anna Ardin’s claim, which was the only remaining allegation at the time. On 8 September 2010, Bjorn Hurtig, Assange’s Swedish lawyer, confirmed that an investigation was still under way but his client had been given no summons for questioning, meaning Assange was free to do what he liked, including going abroad.

On the same day, the head of the Swedish military intelligence service (“MUST”) publicly denounced WikiLeaks in an article titled "WikiLeaks A Threat To Our Soldiers". Assange "became increasingly concerned about Sweden’s close relationship to the US in military and intelligence matters". A trusted intelligence source warned him that US intelligence agents had told their Swedish counterparts that intelligence-sharing arrangements could be cut off if Assange was given shelter.

Assange said the sex accusations were part of "a clear set-up" and had caused damage to WikiLeaks.

Before leaving Sweden, Assange finalised the movement of WikiLeaks servers to the Pionen nuclear bunker. Bahnhof executive Jon Karlung said he was "proud to have clients like these."

Julian Assange’s dramatic soujourn in Sweden had one final twist: when he finally boarded a flight from Sweden to Germany, his "suitcase, laptops, privileged attorney-client communications and other important information belonging to WikiLeaks disappeared". Assange later stated that the disappeared WikiLeaks material "included shocking evidence of a serious war crime; the massacre of more than sixty women and children by US military forces in Garani, Afghanistan".

Despite frantic efforts by many people over the following days, no trace of the disappeared luggage could be found, even though Assange still had a verified check-in docket. Airport staff said they had "never encountered anything like this before”. The luggage was not just lost; it appeared to have never existed in their systems.

Italian journalist and long-time WikiLeaks partner Stefania Maurizi, who had a scheduled meeting in Berlin with Assange, later described how he arrived very late from the airport with just a single laptop, a USB stick, and a plastic bag containing a T-shirt, soap and a toothbrush. The next day at an internet cafe they signed an agreement, witnessed by Kristinn Hrafnsson, and Assange gave Maurizi a copy of the Afghan War Logs files. Then Assange got a phone call from his Swedish lawyer:

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Assange continued flying from Germany to London, where he continued preparing for the Iraq War Logs release.

On 18 November 2010, the new Swedish Prosecutor Marianne Ny ordered the detention of Julian Assange "with probable cause, suspected of rape, three cases of sexual molestation and illegal coercion". A European Arrest Warrant was issued. Although Assange had been interviewed by Swedish police, had remained in Sweden for a month after Marianne Ny took over the case, and had left the country because he was not summoned by Ny for questioning, the Swedish Prosecuting Authority insisted that a new warrant was required "as it has been impossible to interview him during the investigation".

Astonishingly, Sweden also issued an Interpol Red Notice.

Assange’s lawyers appealed the Swedish arrest warrant all the way to the Sweden’s Supreme Court, arguing that there was no such thing as "minor rape", that "rape" was a mistranslation of the Swedish terminology, and that the allegations did not meet English or European legal definition of "rape". But the Swedish Supreme Court refused to hear Assange’s case.

Legal observers wondered why Sweden did not simply go and question Assange in Britain, as happened frequently in such European Arrest Warrant cases. The simple answer may be that UK Crown Prosecutors, then headed by Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer, advised them to stay away.

A Freedom of Information request in Sweden, lodged by Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, later revealed that a lawyer for the UK Crown Prosecuting Service, Paul Close, "had, unaccountably, advised the Swedes in 2010 or 2011 not to visit London to interview Assange". Close wrote to the Swedish prosecutors on 25 January 2011:

It’s not clear when this "earlier advice" was provided, or what exactly it said. But on 13 January 2011 Close wrote:

In yet another astonishing turn of events, all Paul Close’s correspondence about Assange with Swedish prosecutors was mysteriously deleted when he retired in 2014. The Swedish government also destroyed further correspondence between the Swedish Prosecution Authority and the UK Crown Prosecution Service (as another FOI request from Stefania Maurizi later revealed: both the Swedish Court of Appeal and the Swedish Parliamentary Ombudsmen rejected her requests and refused to provide an explanation).

It seems quite possible that UK Crown Prosecutors were telling Sweden not to come and question Assange in London from the day they issued a European Arrest Warrant. And yet for years Assange was publicly condemned by British MPs (and many others) for refusing to go to Sweden, where he would have been immediately jailed and most likely quickly extradited to the USA, who had a sealed indictment waiting.

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NEXT CHAPTER: SEVEN

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The author of this book can be found on Twitter: @Jaraparilla

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