Part 6 (1/2)

This picture that emerged of US diplomatic dealings with Libya was thus richly textured and fascinating. It showed a superpower at work: cajoling, fixing, eavesdropping, manoeuvring and sometimes bullying. It also showed the dismayingly crazed att.i.tudes of a foreign ruler possessing both nuclear ambitions and a lucrative reservoir of the world's oil a truth which his own subjects would rarely be allowed to see. And, from the point of view of a domestic British reporter, it showed how limited the options open to the UK seemed to be despite its pretensions to punch above its weight in the world.

These doc.u.ments had to be treated carefully, Leigh realised. Some of the informants who described Gaddafi's idiosyncrasies would clearly have to have their ident.i.ties protected. Although the cables themselves were obviously genuine, it did not mean that the a.n.a.lysis and gossip reported therein were also always correct. And one had to bear in mind that the authors of these dispatches to Was.h.i.+ngton also had their own agendas. They wanted to impress. They wanted to promote their own views. Sometimes they simply wanted to demonstrate that they knew what was going on: diplomats, like journalists, were all too capable of turning a shallow lunch with a ”contact” into a hot story, for career-enhancing reasons.

Nevertheless, with all these caveats, it was clear that America's secret diplomatic dealings over Libya were immensely revelatory. They were not only newsworthy, but also important. This was a picture of the world seen through a much less scrambled prism than usual. And there were more than another 100 countries to go! Leigh was plunging once more into the database bran-tub when his landline suddenly rang, breaking into the silence of the surrounding Highland hills. It was his London colleague Nick Davies, with a bewildering message. It was one that threatened to derail the entire WikiLeaks enterprise. ”Julian's about to be arrested in Sweden!” he said ”He's being accused of rape.”

CHAPTER 12.

The world's most famous man

Sonja Braun's flat, Stockholm Friday 13 August 2010

”Sonja tried a number of times to reach for a condom, but a.s.sange stopped her by holding her arms and pinning her legs”

BRAUN TESTIMONY, SWEDISH POLICE DOSSIER.

The revelation that Julian a.s.sange had been accused of rape came as a bombsh.e.l.l. In a series of frantic overseas phone calls, Leigh and Davies attempted to piece together a history of the disastrous s.e.xual collisions that occurred in that Nordic high summer, which would eventually lead to Swedish prosecutors pursuing extradition of a.s.sange from Britain to face questioning over allegations of s.e.xual misconduct. No one had antic.i.p.ated this.

One thing is clear: on present evidence Julian a.s.sange is absolutely not a rapist as the term is understood by many that is, he does not practise, nor is he accused of, the premeditated and brutal s.e.xual violence that the word ”rapist” evokes in tabloid headlines.

But during his time in London, a.s.sange did often seem to have a restlessly predatory att.i.tude towards women. It contrasted with his otherwise cool demeanour. a.s.sange's behaviour once even caused his own blonde lawyer, Jennifer Robinson from the firm of Finers Stephens Innocent, to blush brick-red. Gathered at the head of the stairs inside the Guardian Guardian building, a group of hungry reporters, with a.s.sange and a number of his legal team, were debating plans to go out and eat. ”Shall we take the lawyers with us?” a journalist asked. a.s.sange leered at Robinson and said, ”Let's just take the pretty one.” building, a group of hungry reporters, with a.s.sange and a number of his legal team, were debating plans to go out and eat. ”Shall we take the lawyers with us?” a journalist asked. a.s.sange leered at Robinson and said, ”Let's just take the pretty one.”

A WikiLeaks staffer confided later: ”We've simply had to tell Julian he must stop making s.e.xually inappropriate remarks.” Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, one of several exasperated women, said, charitably, that it was important to bear in mind the culture a.s.sange came from. She told the online Daily Beast Daily Beast: ”Julian is brilliant in many ways, but he doesn't have very good social skills ... and he's a cla.s.sic Aussie in the sense that he's a bit of a male chauvinist.”

Men like a.s.sange, who refer to women as ”hotties”, hail from the land of coa.r.s.e jokes about the one-eyed trouser snake a considerable contrast to sober Swedes, who are well-advanced in their understanding of women's s.e.xual rights.

The stage was thus set in Sweden for an ambiguous and, as it proved, highly controversial encounter.

On Wednesday 11 August a.s.sange flew in from London. That evening he dined out at the Beirut Cafe, a Lebanese restaurant in north Stockholm, one of a party of five. Present were 56-year-old Donald Bostrom, the Swedish journalist who was WikiLeaks' local connection, and his wife. The other pair round the table were Russ Baker, a US reporter with cropped grey hair who last year published a controversial book about the Bush family, and a woman friend with whom Baker was travelling. a.s.sange made such a brazen, though unsuccessful, play for this latter woman, according to those present, that a row broke out. ”a.s.sange and Baker actually ended up squaring up to each other outside the restaurant,” says one of those closely involved.

Bostrom says he felt uneasy for his celebrity friend. He warned a.s.sange that his behaviour was a security risk, for ”he would not be the first great man to be brought down by a woman in a short skirt”. Bostrom says that he could see that a.s.sange's notoriety and evident courage were proving remarkably attractive to women: ”There's a bit of the rock star phenomenon about it. The world's most famous man, in some people's eyes. Really intelligent and that's attractive and he takes on the Pentagon. That's impressive to many. I could say the majority of women who come in contact with him fall completely. They become bewitched.”

Friday the 13th lived up to its reputation, at least as far as a.s.sange was concerned. When his trip began, the celebrity leaker was staying in the suburb of Sodermalm, in an unoccupied Stockholm flat belonging to Sonja Braun (not her real name), a politically active 31-year-old official of the Brotherhood movement, a Christian group affiliated to the large Social Democrat party. Braun is a slim, dark-haired feminist who speaks English and was previously an equality officer at a top Swedish university. It was Braun who invited a.s.sange to come to Sweden and give a seminar, and indeed she seems to have specifically arranged that a.s.sange should sleep at her flat. Significantly, that flat has only one room and only one bed, say a.s.sange's lawyers.

Before a.s.sange's arrival, Braun called Bostrom, the journalist recalls. ”We had never met before, and she says: 'h.e.l.lo, my name is Sonja Braun and I'm planning this seminar and I'll be away on a business trip and my flat will be empty and Julian could stay there. Would you suggest it?' It would be cheaper for the Brotherhood movement, who wouldn't need to pay hotel bills, and Julian would rather live in a flat than in a hotel, so I suggest it and he jumps at it. So I put the two of them together. I'm the middleman, so to speak. The idea was that Julian would live there up to the Friday, I think. The seminar was on Sat.u.r.day. Sonja was supposed to return on the Sat.u.r.day.”

Braun decided to come back a day early, however. At this point, accounts begin to diverge. a.s.sange's lawyers supplied a brisk chronology to a later London court hearing, saying: ”Braun arrives without explanation, takes him to dinner and invites him to bed. She supplies a condom and they have intercourse several times.” The lawyers add tartly: ”Early morning: Braun takes photograph of Julian asleep in her bed (unauthorised), later posted on the internet.”

A rather different version was later given to police by Braun herself. According to her, it was a tale of a night of bad s.e.x, with one peculiar twist. The police doc.u.ment recorded: ”As they sat drinking tea, a.s.sange stroked Sonja's leg. Sonja has stated that at no point earlier in the evening had a.s.sange attempted to press any physical attentions on her, which Sonja initially welcomed. Then, according to Sonja it all went very quickly. a.s.sange was heavy-handed and impatient. He pulled off her clothes and at the same time snapped her necklace. Sonja tried to put on some articles of clothing as it was going too quickly and uncomfortably but a.s.sange ripped them off again. Sonja says that she didn't want to go any further but that it was too late to stop a.s.sange as she had gone along with it so far. She says that she felt she only had herself to blame, and so she allowed a.s.sange to take off her clothes.”

This vigorous wooing does not sound out of character. Another woman in London who got involved with a.s.sange around the same time told the authors: ”I kissed him. Then he started trying to rip my dress off. That was his approach.”

Braun's complaints went further, however. According to the statement, she realised he was trying to have unprotected s.e.x with her. ”She tried to wriggle her hips and cross her legs to stop penetration. Braun tried a number of times to reach for a condom but a.s.sange stopped her by holding her arms and pinning her legs and continued to try and enter her without a condom. Braun says that she was on the verge of tears and couldn't get hold of a condom and thought, 'This is going to end badly.'

”After a while, a.s.sange asked Sonja what it was she was reaching out for and why she was crossing her legs and she said she wanted him to put a condom on ... a.s.sange had by now released her arms and put on a condom that Sonja gave him. Sonja says she felt there was an unspoken resistance from a.s.sange which gave her the idea that he didn't like being told to do things.”

Braun told the police that at some stage a.s.sange had ”done something” with the condom that resulted in it becoming ripped, and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed without withdrawing.

When he was later interviewed by police in Stockholm, a.s.sange agreed that he had had s.e.x with Braun but said he did not tear the condom. He told police that he had continued to sleep in her bed for the following week and she had never mentioned a torn condom.

At 9.30 the following morning, according to the a.s.sange camp, a journalist called to collect a.s.sange for the lecture. ”He is amazed to find Braun there.” She herself seemed embarra.s.sed, and actually denied having had s.e.x with him. Bostrom told police: ”When someone asked, she joked that Julian was living in her flat and was sleeping in her bed, but that they hadn't had s.e.x. She said that he tried, but she refused.” Much later, according to Bostrom, she sheepishly confessed that she did in fact have s.e.x with a.s.sange. Her explanation: ”I was really proud of having the world's most famous man in my bed, and living in my flat.”

At a.s.sange's 11am seminar, on the WikiLeaks theme that ”Truth is the first casualty of war”, Sonja Braun can be seen onstage in video footage. She appeared businesslike, if somewhat subdued.

Bostrom himself was beginning to wonder. At lunch after the seminar, he noted that Braun and a.s.sange were chatting in intimate tones: ”She told me, laughing, that he was a strange guy who got up in the middle of the night to work on his laptop, and she's quite jokey about this. But then at the party she's sitting next to Julian and takes it up again ... 'Were you awake last night?' she says. And she says, 'I woke up and you had got out of bed, and I felt abandoned.' And it was just that word that caught my attention. Why did she feel abandoned if they weren't ...” His account tails off and changes direction. ”Peter Weiderud [a Brotherhood official] says it's crayfish time in Sweden and Julian is here from abroad, so he should try Swedish crayfish.” Braun then dutifully tweeted, at 2pm, ”Julian wants to go to a crayfish party. Anyone have a couple of available seats tonight or tomorrow?” The party was eventually arranged at her own flat at 7pm.

But a.s.sange had, it seems, found other fish to fry. Promising to show up later for the crayfish party, he left the lunch not with Braun but with another admirer in a bright pink sweater. With long blonde hair halfway down her back, 25-year-old Katrin Weiss (not her real name) is a worker at a local museum, or ”some random woman” as Braun is later alleged to have described her.

In Weiss's witness statement, she explained that some weeks earlier she had seen a.s.sange on television and had followed the WikiLeaks news avidly thereafter. She thought a.s.sange ”interesting, brave and admirable”, had been Googling his name, and excitedly discovered he was actually coming to speak in Sweden. She was one of the first to sign up for his talk. ”Sonja came up to Katrin and asked if she could help out by getting hold of a cable for Julian's computer. She then went and bought two cables just to make sure she had the right one. When she returned, he didn't even thank her.”

However, Katrin did manage to parlay this into a chance to get closer to her hero. ”She ... overheard that they were all going out to eat and asked if she could come too because she had been helping out. She then went with Sonja, Julian and some others to a restaurant.” According to the statement, she sent excited texts to two friends from the restaurant to say she was with the Australian. ”He looked at me!” she wrote in one. She took the opportunity to speak to him. ”At one point when he had some cheese on a piece of flatbread, she asked if it was nice, and he reached over and fed it to her. Later he mentioned that he needed a charger for his laptop and she offered to help, as she had fixed him up with a cable earlier on. He took her round the waist and said, 'Yes, you got me a cable.' Katrin thought this was flattering and felt that he was now flirting with her.”

a.s.sange's lawyers argue, however, that it was Katrin who ”flirted with Julian”. Bostrom says: ”After all the journalists have disappeared we're left with this woman who I've never seen before. I get the impression that this is one of those, you know, groupies ... who are attracted by his stardust. I actually don't think she said much apart from when I asked her about how she got into contact with Sonja so I didn't give her much thought other than that she seemed interesting. She and Julian sat across from each other and spoke a bit ... I got the impression of a person who was fascinated by Julian.”

After lunch, Weiss offered to hook him up to her own workplace computer. a.s.sange eventually tired of surfing the net and searching for tweets about himself on Katrin's computer at the museum, and they went to the cinema. ”On the way, Julian stopped to pat some dogs, which Katrin thought was charming.” He held her hand, he kissed her, and fondled her in the darkness of the back row. Before he caught a cab to shoot back to Braun's crayfish party, they exchanged phone numbers. He also hugged her, said he didn't want to leave, and, yes, he did want to see her again.

The crayfish party that night at Braun's flat appears to have had its tricky moments. One woman friend told the police she ”asked Sonja whether she had slept with Julian ... Sonja said, 'Yes!' and seemed quite proud of it.” Braun then tweeted, apparently enthusiastically, ”Sitting outdoors at 2am, hardly freezing, with the world's coolest, smartest people.” But meanwhile a.s.sange was discreetly chatting on the phone to Weiss. According to another female friend interviewed by the police, Kajsa, a.s.sange was simultaneously making approaches to her, which Braun did not take particularly well: ”[Kajsa] wondered about the strange tension between Sonja and Julian, [who] was flirting with Kajsa and other girls. Kajsa asked Sonja if she was going to sleep with Julian. Sonja said she already had done and it was the worst s.e.x she's ever had. She told Kajsa that she could have him.” Braun allegedly added something else: ”Julian had held her hands down when they had s.e.x and it had been unpleasant. Not only had it been the world's worst screw it had also been violent.” At 3am, according to Kajsa, a.s.sange actually tried to leave the party with her. Kajsa refused, she says.

The a.s.sange camp has a different take. They say Braun was acting ”warmly” towards him. She was asked, they say, whether she wanted Julian to move out, but ”insists that he stay ... She says: 'No it's not a problem, he is very welcome to stay here.'”

Donald Bostrom was at the do, but is not much help in shedding further light on events. It seems he was preoccupied with crustacea: ”During the crayfish party, I mostly just sat and ate. I'm very fond of eating. There was talk about Julian moving and staying with another couple, but the general impression was that Julian would be staying with Sonja.”

Braun shared a bed with a.s.sange again that night, but during the course of the weekend she spoke critically of him to another friend, Petra. She told her on the Sunday ”they had not had s.e.x any more because Julian had exceeded the limits of what she felt she could accept ... She didn't feel safe ... Julian had been violent and had snapped her necklace. She thought he had torn [the condom] on purpose.” Petra added that her friend had volunteered to her a lot of other off-putting information ”about Julian not taking showers and not flus.h.i.+ng the toilet”.

The a.s.sange camp tell it differently. They say Sonja hosted dinner for a.s.sange that Sunday night. She spoke highly of him and again refused offers to house him elsewhere. The following day she phoned Bostrom, they claim, and joked ruefully that a.s.sange has become ”their first adopted child” because she has insisted on was.h.i.+ng his clothes, makes sure he eats properly and she feels like his stepmother. There has been no more s.e.xual intercourse, despite a.s.sange's efforts to win her round.

Meanwhile, Weiss has been vainly trying to get back in contact with a.s.sange: his mobile is frequently switched off. Among other things, he has been busy looking at how he might acquire Swedish residence and journalistic credentials. It is not until late on Tuesday 17 August that they meet up again. Weiss was later to give to police an account of what turned out to be an unhappy one-night stand.

”She agreed to wait for him, and after she was finished at work, she hung around town a bit. When she hadn't heard from him by nine, she called him and he said there was another meeting he had to go to, and that she should come to him there.” When a.s.sange finally emerged, they agree to get the train together to Enkoping, the little town 50 miles away where she lives. He asked that Katrin pay for the tickets; it was too dangerous for him to use his credit card, he said. Weiss told the police that, on the train, he admitted he slept in Braun's bed after the crayfish party but made the unlikely claim that ”Sonja only liked girls that she was lesbian”.

It was midnight when they at last got home to Weiss's place. ”They took off their shoes, but the relations.h.i.+p between them seemed to have cooled off. The pa.s.sion and the excitement had disappeared ... They brushed their teeth together, which seemed everyday and boring.” a.s.sange pushed her vigorously on to the bed ”to show he was a real man”, Weiss told the police, but his heart plainly wasn't in it. a.s.sange suddenly turned over, went to sleep, and started snoring.

Weiss says she felt ”rejected and shocked”, and stayed awake, miserably texting her friend Maria. Maria recalls being ”woken by a lot of texts from Katrin that were not positive. There had been bad s.e.x and Julian had not been nice. She said she would have to get tested because of his lengthy foreplay.” Matters improved somewhat in the course of the night. Julian woke up and had successful s.e.x, grumbling about her insistence on a condom. He ”muttered that he preferred her, rather than latex”. In the early morning, he started ordering her about, demanding she fetch water and orange juice, and then sending her out to buy breakfast. Weiss testified she didn't much like leaving him alone in her flat. She said, ”Be good,” as she went out, leaving him sprawled emperor-like and naked on the bed, holding one of his mobile phones. He answered: ”I'm always bad!”

While Weiss was at the shops purchasing breakfast, she took the opportunity to call her friend Maria. ”Katrin said she was d.a.m.ned if she was going to buy all this stuff and just wait on him hand and foot.” But she nevertheless went home, she says, cooked him porridge, climbed back into bed, and they had another go, using a condom. ”They slept again and she woke with the realisation that he was inside her. She said, ”Are you wearing anything?” and he answered, ”You.” She said, ”You better not have HIV,” and he answered, ”Of course not.” She knew it was too late, she said, as he was already inside her so she let him continue. She had never had unprotected s.e.x before. ”She said: what if she got pregnant? And he replied that Sweden was a good place to bring up a child. She looked at him, shocked.”

According to her testimony he added, flippantly, that they could call the baby ”Afghanistan”. The police report adds a strange and disturbing remark from Katrin: ”He also said he often carried abortion pills but that they were actually sugar pills.” Whatever did he mean? a.s.sange often seemed curiously proud of his prowess in paternity: he told friends during this time period that he had recently impregnated a Korean woman he met in Paris, and she was about to give birth.

This single night he spent with Katrin is the basis of a rape charge against a.s.sange. To have s.e.x with a sleeping or unconscious woman is a crime, both in Sweden and in the UK. The subsequent investigation collected testimony from Weiss's former boyfriend that she was particularly anxious to avoid the risks from unprotected s.e.x, and never allowed it. After a.s.sange headed back to Stockholm (she had to pay for his train ticket again), Weiss changed the stained sheets, which she thought were ”disgusting”, and got a morning-after pill from a chemist. ”When she spoke to her friends, she realised that she had been the victim of a crime. She went to Danderyd University Hospital and from there to Sodersjukhuset (Stockholm South General Hospital) where she was tested with a so-called rape kit.”