by Costas Efimeros

Since there are many who are already well informed on the life and work of Julian Assange, I tried to signify the historical parts with grey italics. Those who “know” can overlook those parts.


The Ecuadorian embassy stands close to Harrods, the iconic London department store, at a very expensive area. The meeting with Julian Assange had been programmed for 2:00pm but, to be sure, I arrived at Kensington almost an hour earlier. Seated at a bench in front of the Harrods windows I could see the embassy building while an old Scotsman busker was playing the bagpipes for the passersby. 

Scotland Yard has announced that they would terminate the 24/7 surveillance of the building where Julian Assange resides due to the exorbitant cost of such an operation (10ml GBP until now). I did, however, spot  a van with shaded windows parked right outside the entrance of the embassy. It couldn't be a coincidence.

Why did I have to meet Assange at the Embassy of Ecuador

Julian Assange climbed the steps that I am looking at on June 19,  2012 and asked for political asylum, which was granted two months later.  The founder of Wikileaks was trying to avoid extradition to the USA, who were persecuting him for espionage and “four more accusations”, after he had published the top secret telegrams of US embassies from around the world. 
 
Assange sought the protection of Rafael Correa's government in order not to be extradited to Sweden. Sweden had issued an arrest warrant against him due to an investigation for sexual crimes against two women. One of them has accused him of having unprotected sexual contact with her, while she was asleep (in previous contacts between them she had made it clear that she wanted him to use a condom) while she was entertaining him as a guest in her home,  in Stockholm, in 2010. Assange denies the accusations and claims that Sweden is acting as a “lure” in order for him to be extradited in the US. He has plenty  of good  reasons to believe that this is the case.

Until today, 3 years later, the Swedish government has yet to turn the investigation into an accusation. To be precise, the case was closed after the initial investigation which included the statement of the woman who is accusing him. The woman is said to have revoked her initial statement, The pre-investigation documents include SMSs from her phone where she admitted to third parties that she made up the accusation on order for Assange to notice her, and that the police pressured her into suing for rape by doctoring her testimony. The case was eventually reopened a month after it was closed and only after Assange had left Sweden (he remained in Stockholm for almost four weeks after the  complaint was filed; no one sought him about the case). The warrant for his arrest is not based on any indictment.

Great Britain conceded to the international warrant and Assange surrendered to the authorities on December 7, 2010. The legal procedures came to completion on May, 2012 when Her Majesty's Appeal Court ordered his extradition to Sweden. During the hearing process, which was covered live from all the major media, (ThePressProject in Greece) the owner of Wikileaks stated that he had no objection to being questioned by the Swedish prosecutors in London. The Swedish state rejected that.

A few days after the end of the deadline for his extradition, Assange walked through the doors of the Embassy of Ecuador. Despite the fact that he has been granted political asylum, Great Britain does not only deny him the use of the “free pass” (a diplomatic rule which would allow him to reach the airport in order to fly to Ecuador) but on August 16 of 2012, it informed Ecuador that it would suspend the Embassy's diplomatic immunity in order to enter the building and arrest him. The vehement reaction of Latin American countries, and the protestors who gathered outside the Embassy in order to support the Australian whistle blower, forced the British government to step down.

A rabbit hole

A quarter of an hour earlier than the appointment, I decided to get in the Embassy. The van with the shaded windows had departed two minutes ago and I had started thinking that perhaps I was being paranoid. On the other hand, behind the doors in front of me, lived the most wanted journalist in world, so it is certain that someone was watching me while I rung the bell.

A security officer opens the door. He is friendly but he adheres to a strict protocol. I give him the bag with all my stuff and I hand him the dictaphone that I will be using for the interview. He scans me for metallic objects, takes my id and closes the door back. I wait for a few minutes outside the Embassy but he reemerges and beckons me in. “You are early” he says (I knew that). He will hold on to the dictaphone until the time when the interview begins.

When we think about Embassies we think of generous buildings with grand gardens. The Embassy of Ecuador in London is just an apartment on the ground floor of a typical London house. Not that spacey at best. I look around me; the main area is not bigger than 30sqm, it houses the ambassadors' office, the offices of the diplomats, the common areas, and the conference room. That is where I will be guided in ten minutes. A heavy wooden dining table takes up most of the space. Before he leaves me alone, the officer hands me the tape recorder and pushes a button in a device which is supposed to scramble bugs.

I am not much of an active person. I spend 99% of my time in front of a computer screen and my legs find it odd when they are asked to carry me around for more than 20 minutes. Still the feeling of lack of freedom is stiffing when one thinks that Assange has been suffering this peculiar isolation for more than three years. His health has suffered too. Recently, Britain has denied to allow him to visit a hospital in order to get an MRA for a deep pain he feels in his shoulder. I am thinking that Great Britain is not so great. A thought which will be confirmed in a most impressive manner a bit later on.
In the mean time, Julian Assange enters the room and I stand to greet him.

How not to take an interview

He seems tired but highly active too. He sits on the chair opposite me but jumps right up when he realizes that he needs coffee. “I haven't slept for more than two hours”, he says, “something important came up”.

Any normal journalist, even a first year student, would have thought to ask, “what came up”. I didn't. I had a piece of paper with my questions and notes in front of me -they seem utterly boring now- and for some reason, I was not going to make any better ones. He agreed to make the interview in English; his Greek is kind of rusty. He starts by telling me that he just came from a meeting with his lawyers. The bank account case seems to be going well.

In the end of 2010, right after the CableGate revelations, the biggest banks decided to impose an unprecedented banking blockade to Wikileaks which only operates through crowdfunding.   Mastercard, Visa, and Paypal were among the institutions that denied to handle donations towards Wikileaks. This decision triggered the reaction of the Anonymous hackers who organized operation “Payback”. Through it, they released a DDOS attack which put the worldwide infrastructure of money transfers out of order for several hours. Wikileaks has started legal procedures against those institutions claiming lost revenues.

As I was trying to decide which would be my first question (all of them seemed suddenly inadequate) in Italy the Espresso newspaper had come out with an impressive revelation. The journalist, Stefania Maurizi used the Freedom of Information Act asked the Swedish Attorney office and the British Investigation Department for all the documents concerning the extradition of Julian Assange. The British did not comply but the Swedish gave her 226 pages of documents. 

These prove that it was the British side which did not want the Swedish magistrate to visit London and, indeed, was quite adamant about it. From these documents it is also shown that last March, five years after the rape complaint was filed, the Swedish attorney Marianne NY -who runs the Assange case- changed her mind and decided that she would visit him at the embassy in order to question him. A month later, Assange was contacted and he agreed to meet with her on June 17 and 18 and give a DNA sample. The formal request towards the Embassy was placed only two days before the appointed dates and the government of Ecuador rejected it.   
 
So, that was the “something” that had “come up” that night and Assange's lawyers will use the information in order to move against the ruling for his extradition to Sweden from the UK.
 
Still, I knew nothing about all those news as I decided to ask him my first question about the various movements that his actions have inspired. And that is how my interview with Julian Assange begun. It is not earth shattering. In fact twice he, himself restated my questions into more interesting ones. The truth is that I am more at ease with investigating work. Furthermore, with Julian Assange my weaknesses were magnified due to my emotional reaction towards him.
 
Those who know me are aware that I am not a particularly courteous person. In general I consider the reporting job to be impertinent by definition.  One has to feel at least equal with his interviewee if one really wants to extract something worthy. With Julian Assange that was not the case.
 
People like Assange and Snowden -the whistleblowers- are those who put their lives in danger in order to reveal truths. A journalist is the first person who comprehends the magnitude of the pressure they have to deal with due to their actions. The harassment, the legal war, and the phonecalls which befall all those who attempt to do investigating journalism in Greece would only make Assange laugh.
 
Besides my respect for Assange, there was one more reason which further hindered my ability to “interrogate” the founder of Wikileaks. It was the Cablegate revelation that led us to change our views and create the portal that you are now reading. Until then, a few months into our project, we were an eclectic aggregator of reports which concerned the Greek people, yet no other medium seemed willing to publish. It was the leak of those telegrams that made us start producing journalism on our own, and set up the first version of SearchLab. But that is another story all together.
 

This publication has been produced within the partnership with Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso for the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF), co-funded by the European Commission. The contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of IPS Communication Foundation and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the European Union.