Assange new yorker profile

He and other officials proposed that Americans seize Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy, transfer him to a second country where he could be interrogated, then move him to the U. In a less drastic scenario, intelligence officers would simply turn Assange over to the British after kidnapping him from the embassy.

These extreme moves appeared to be on very shaky legal ground, especially because Assange had not been formally charged in the U. Some White House lawyers officials were reportedly so concerned about the plan that they alerted lawmakers in an effort to draw attention to it.

Yahoo reports that as the rendition plot was being batted around, U. The U. Those included potential gun battles with Kremlin operatives on the streets of London, crashing a car into a Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange and then grabbing him, and shooting out the tires of a Russian plane carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow. With Ecuador having signed off on the plan to exfiltrate Assange to Russia and a bevy of undercover agents from various countries stationed around the embassy, the stage seemed set for some sort of showdown.

But Assange himself rejected the idea, and the Russians canceled the operation after learning that the Americans were aware of it. But if kidnapping Assange was a legally shaky proposition at best , assassinating him was truly a bridge too far for a preponderance of decision-makers — even for the Trump administration. The plan went nowhere. Yahoo reports that a Spanish security company Ecuador had hired to help shield its embassy from prying eyes was in fact doing double duty — working for U.

The Spanish firm was providing U. Advocates of press freedoms had urged the new administration to instead drop a Trump-era effort to prosecute the WikiLeaks founder. By Charlie Savage and Elian Peltier. A Friday deadline in the London extradition case may force the Biden administration to decide whether to keep pursuing a Trump-era policy. Supporters of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have enlisted a lobbyist with connections to the president and filed a clemency petition with the White House.

In a roundabout way, he laid out an unusual proposition: an organization called WikiLeaks, a secretive cadre of antisecrecy vigilantes, had come into possession of a substantial amount of classified United States government communications.

There might be more after that, including an immense bundle of confidential diplomatic cables. The Guardian suggested — to increase the impact as well as to share the labor of handling such a trove — that The New York Times be invited to share this exclusive bounty. The source agreed. Was I interested? The adventure that ensued over the next six months combined the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of handling a vast secret archive with the more mundane feat of sorting, searching and understanding a mountain of data.

By the end of the year, the story of this wholesale security breach had outgrown the story of the actual contents of the secret documents and generated much breathless speculation that something — journalism, diplomacy, life as we know it — had profoundly changed forever. Schmitt has covered military affairs expertly for years, has read his share of classified military dispatches and has excellent judgment and an unflappable demeanor.

His main assignment was to get a sense of the material. Was it genuine? Was it of public interest? He would also report back on the proposed mechanics of our collaboration with The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel, which Assange invited as a third guest to his secret smorgasbord.

Schmitt would also meet the WikiLeaks leader, who was known to a few Guardian journalists but not to us. There was no question in his mind that the Afghanistan dispatches were genuine. They were fascinating — a diary of a troubled war from the ground up. And there were intimations of more to come, especially classified cables from the entire constellation of American diplomatic outposts.

WikiLeaks was holding those back for now, presumably to see how this venture with the establishment media worked out. Over the next few days, Schmitt huddled in a discreet office at The Guardian, sampling the trove of war dispatches and discussing the complexities of this project: how to organize and study such a voluminous cache of information; how to securely transport, store and share it; how journalists from three very different publications would work together without compromising their independence; and how we would all assure an appropriate distance from Julian Assange.

We regarded Assange throughout as a source, not as a partner or collaborator, but he was a man who clearly had his own agenda. By the time of the meetings in London, WikiLeaks had already acquired a measure of international fame or, depending on your point of view, notoriety. Shortly before I got the call from The Guardian, The New Yorker published a rich and colorful profile of Assange , by Raffi Khatchadourian, who had embedded with the group.

While some of the people in the video were armed, others gave no indication of menace; two were in fact journalists for the news agency Reuters. The video, with its soundtrack of callous banter, was horrifying to watch and was an embarrassment to the U. Throughout our dealings, Assange was coy about where he obtained his secret cache.

But the suspected source of the video, as well as the military dispatches and the diplomatic cables to come, was a disillusioned U. Army private first class named Bradley Manning, who had been arrested and was being kept in solitary confinement.

On the fourth day of the London meeting, Assange slouched into The Guardian office, a day late. Schmitt took his first measure of the man who would be a large presence in our lives. Assange shrugged a huge backpack off his shoulders and pulled out a stockpile of laptops, cords, cellphones, thumb drives and memory sticks that held the WikiLeaks secrets. The reporters had begun preliminary work on the Afghanistan field reports , using a large Excel spreadsheet to organize the material, then plugging in search terms and combing the documents for newsworthy content.

They had run into a puzzling incongruity: Assange said the data included dispatches from the beginning of through the end of , but the material on the spreadsheet ended abruptly in April A considerable amount of material was missing. Assange, slipping naturally into the role of office geek, explained that they had hit the limits of Excel.

Open a second spreadsheet, he instructed. They did, and the rest of the data materialized — a total of 92, reports from the battlefields of Afghanistan. The reporters came to think of Assange as smart and well educated, extremely adept technologically but arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous. This office, Assange asserted, was thoroughly infiltrated by former Stasi agents who were quietly destroying the documents they were entrusted with protecting.

The Der Spiegel reporter in the group, John Goetz, who has reported extensively on the Stasi, listened in amazement. Some former Stasi personnel were hired as security guards in the office, but the records were well protected. Assange was openly contemptuous of the American government and certain that he was a hunted man. He told the reporters that he had prepared a kind of doomsday option.

He had, he said, distributed highly encrypted copies of his entire secret archive to a multitude of supporters, and if WikiLeaks was shut down, or if he was arrested, he would disseminate the key to make the information public. One night, when they were all walking down the street after dinner, Assange suddenly started skipping ahead of the group.

Schmitt and Goetz stared, speechless. Then, just as suddenly, Assange stopped, got back in step with them and returned to the conversation he had interrupted. Journalists are characteristically competitive, but the group worked well together. They brainstormed topics to explore and exchanged search results.

Der Spiegel offered to check the logs against incident reports submitted by the German Army to its Parliament — partly as story research, partly as an additional check on authenticity. Assange provided us the data on the condition that we not write about it before specific dates that WikiLeaks planned on posting the documents on a publicly accessible Web site.

The Afghanistan documents would go first, after we had a few weeks to search the material and write our articles. The larger cache of Iraq-related documents would go later.

Such embargoes — agreements not to publish information before a set date — are commonplace in journalism. Everything from studies in medical journals to the annual United States budget is released with embargoes. They are a constraint with benefits, the principal one being the chance to actually read and reflect on the material before publishing it into public view. As Assange surely knew, embargoes also tend to build suspense and amplify a story, especially when multiple news outlets broadcast it at once.

The embargo was the only condition WikiLeaks would try to impose on us; what we wrote about the material was entirely up to us. Much later, some American news outlets reported that they were offered last-minute access to WikiLeaks documents if they signed contracts with financial penalties for early disclosure.

The Times was never asked to sign anything or to pay anything. For WikiLeaks, at least in this first big venture, exposure was its own reward. Back in New York we assembled a team of reporters, data experts and editors and quartered them in an out-of-the-way office.

Andrew Lehren, of our computer-assisted-reporting unit, did the first cut, searching terms on his own or those suggested by other reporters, compiling batches of relevant documents and summarizing the contents.

We assigned reporters to specific areas in which they had expertise and gave them password access to rummage in the data. This became the routine we would follow with subsequent archives.

An air of intrigue verging on paranoia permeated the project, perhaps understandably, given that we were dealing with a mass of classified material and a source who acted like a fugitive, changing crash pads, e-mail addresses and cellphones frequently. We used encrypted Web sites. Reporters exchanged notes via Skype, believing it to be somewhat less vulnerable to eavesdropping.

He motorcycled across Vietnam. He held various jobs, and even earned money as a computer-security consultant, supporting his son to the extent that he was able. He studied physics at the University of Melbourne.

He thought that trying to decrypt the secret laws governing the universe would provide the intellectual stimulation and rush of hacking. It did not. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare. These ideas soon evolved into WikiLeaks.