Like a previous saga of Saipan, we haven’t heard the last of Julian Assange

The Micronesian volcanic island of Saipan – a US outpost in the Pacific with a bloody and violent past long before Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy set foot on it – was the unlikely setting for a chapter in another interminable saga this week. Once again, it involved competing alternate versions of reality, intense diplomatic manoeuvrings, an agog media and at least one seismic ego.

But unlike Roy versus Mick, the US vs Julian Assange culminated in a deal and a happy ending, of sorts.

Dressed in a brown tie embroidered with blue lettering, an almost celestially pale Assange strode into the Saipan courthouse on Wednesday and left a short time later a free man. He walked out into the throng of reporters, smiled and nodded, looking slightly dazed by it all.

And that was it. With a single guilty plea to one charge under the US Espionage Act, a chapter that began in 2010 came to an end on this 23km-long island famous for its changing regimes and unchanging temperatures. Assange was free to return to Australia and an “ecstatic welcome”, a long-awaited reunion with his wife, lawyer Stella Moris, and the two children he fathered while he was holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Like a previous saga of Saipan, we haven’t heard the last of Julian Assange

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Depending where you stand on the messiah-or-devil spectrum, this episode will be interpreted in one of two ways: either the long overdue end to a petty and ominous persecution of a brave hacker who had embarrassed the US government, or another stroke by a serial ducker and diver; a champion of transparency who insisted on his innocence in the face of sexual offences charges, but spent seven years hiding in an embassy rather than go to Sweden to prove it.

Both and neither are true, which is the paradox of Assange. In an era when public opinion demands every prominent figure be either a hero or a villain, he defies categorisation as either. He has leaked things that were in the public interest and things that weren’t. He is both the underdog who had to endure years of prosecution by a vindictive superpower and a reckless hacker with grandiose notions. He calls himself “editor-in-chief” of WikiLeaks and claims that he was prosecuted for “ordinary journalistic practice” – but he sometimes flouts ordinary journalistic codes by offering money for information and publishing unredacted files that could identify and endanger sources.

His legacy is decidedly mixed. He was responsible for exposing footage of a US helicopter firing on civilians in Baghdad in 2007 and revealing extrajudicial killings in Kenya. But he also published Democratic emails that had been hacked by a Russian intelligence agency during the 2016 US presidential campaign, ultimately boosting Trump’s election bid. The US claims he is the whistleblower who put the lives of whistleblowers at risk; the judge who heard his guilty plea this week pointed out that no actual victims have ever been identified.

And then there is his personal behaviour – not relevant to an assessment of the impact of his work perhaps, but not exactly an advertisement for him as an unsung hero of our times either. During the seven years he lived in a converted office in the Ecuadorean embassy, where he entertained visitors including Lady Gaga and Pamela Anderson, he tried the patience of staff to the point where, in 2018, he was given a set of house rules which included “taking better care of his cat and keeping the bathroom clean”. The following year, he was accused of “discourteous and aggressive behaviour” and unceremoniously dragged out. More damning, of course, is the reason why he was there to begin with.

In 2010, Swedish authorities issued an arrest warrant for him in connection with two sexual offences. He was accused of raping one woman and sexually molesting and coercing another during a trip to Stockholm in August 2010, allegations he denies. After the UK supreme court upheld the Swedish warrant, he fled to the embassy to avoid extradition.

The Swedish case was later dropped due to the time that had passed, and largely forgotten after the US department of justice’s file on Assange became public in 2019, and it was apparent that the charges against him were almost entirely concerned with documents leaked by Chelsea Manning, which had been published in co-ordination with major international news outlets.

During the Obama administration, the department of justice did not actively pursue his extradition, on the grounds that the same charges could be brought against the news organisations he worked with. But that policy changed under Trump and later Biden. At that point, whatever your view of Assange’s professional ethics or personal morality, his fight became bigger than him. Civil rights groups joined the campaign for his release. Ironically, it was the actions of a vindictive US, far more than anything he did himself, that resuscitated his reputation and made him a hero for press freedom.

Now even his most ardent critics seem to agree that the 14 years he has already served is enough. On X, one of his accusers, Anna Ardin, said: “Since I got crap every time bad things happened to Assange, maybe I can get some credit now that he’s free? Joking aside, I’ve had zero power here, but I’m glad he’s out & hope he’ll fight for transparency & human rights, without preying on women.”

Whatever your reservations about Assange and his methods, it is long past time that he is allowed to enjoy the rest of his life – though the notion that he will do so quietly may be the most outlandish of all the speculation swirling around him. Like the other saga of Saipan, this is a story that has dragged on far too long, and still has a way to run.