The Most Dangerous Man In The World

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks' Fight for Freedom

Andrew Fowler

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780522876888
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

With forensic detail, Andrew Fowler provides a ringside seat at the epic battle that has made Julian Assange the USA's public enemy number one. Since it was first published, The Most Dangerous Man in the World has been translated and distributed in countries from China to Romania and the USA to Russia. Now, through recent interviews and the latest research, Fowler tells the extraordinary story of how a computer hacker with a turbulent childhood became holed up in London's Ecuador Embassy for seven years, and is now battling extradition to the USA from the notorious maximum security Belmarsh prison in London. Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was called The Most Dangerous Man in America by the Nixon White House. In the Trump era, Ellsberg says Julian Assange, whose new journalism has made him powerful enemies, should be proud to be The Most Dangerous Man in the World.

1

FATAL ATTRACTION

Magnetic Island, off the north-east Queensland coast, is about as far away from Melbourne as you can get without leaving the country. Named by Captain Cook, who believed the island distorted his ship’s compass readings, it now has another kind of attraction: it’s where people go to retire, as well as a popular destination for holiday-makers looking to escape the blistering heat of Australia’s summers. It also attracts artists and travellers who revel in its beauty and tranquillity.

It was to Magnetic Island that Christine Assange, an artist, made her way in 1971. She’d just given birth to her son Julian at the local hospital in Townsville back on the mainland. Known as the capital of northern Queensland, it is in fact a big country town. Its biggest claim to fame is that for many years it was home to Australian golfing legend, Greg Norman. As Christine made her way on to the ferry wharf, she must have wondered what life had in store for her and her newborn boy. There was no husband in tow. The two of them were on their own.

As a nonconformist Christine was used to coping by herself. She’d had a tempestuous relationship with her father, and has been described as ‘very strong-willed’. At one time in an act of defiance she burned her school books—which, considering she was the daughter of a college principal, was clearly designed to have maximum impact.

By all accounts Christine’s father, Warren Hawkins, was a strict disciplinarian at the college and was probably not much different with his family. He is remembered by one person who worked with him as a ‘staunch traditionalist’. In the early 1970s, when she was seventeen, Christine ran away from home, having bought a motorcycle and a tent with the profits she made from selling her paintings. In Sydney, she joined a thriving counterculture community where she fell in love with a ‘rebellious young man’ she met at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration. His name was John Shipton. But the relationship didn’t last long and a few months later she was heading back north, pregnant and single. Shipton would re-enter Julian Assange’s life much later as a supporter.

Now as the ferry turned north-east and headed out into the seven-kilometre channel that separates Magnetic Island from mainland Australia, Christine prepared for their first night on the idyllic island. She’d managed to rent a cottage for $12 a week at Picnic Point, on the island’s southern shore, just metres from the water.

Not much has changed along the palm-lined bay where Julian spent his first few months. It’s like a time capsule of a bygone era of Australia: quiet, open roads and quarter-acre blocks. It’s always been this way. Such is the pace of life on Magnetic Island that it’s still a matter of heated debate there whether or not Christine Assange shot a taipan snake as it nestled on Julian’s bed.

Even in his first months of life, Christine saw there was something special about Julian. She would hang intricately woven scarves across his pram so he could look at them, and Christine says he was fascinated by the patterns—he seemed to be unpicking them in his brain. Not far from where Julian and his mother lived, it’s possible to gain a glimpse into their past, in the visitor book of the local cultural centre and museum. Christine left a note in there in a firm, elegant hand. She wrote that she lived ‘in a bikini’ and was ‘going native with my baby and other mums on the island’.

Luckily, their nearby house had been built to withstand the massive tropical storms that intermittently hammer the coastline of northern Queensland. On Christmas Eve 1971, Cyclone Althea roared in from the Pacific, producing winds in excess of 200 kilometres an hour. The house survived the battering, which damaged or demolished 90 percent of other homes on the island.

Five years later, Christine and her young son returned to Magnetic Island with someone she describes as a ‘new husband’ of three years, Brett Assange—a fellow artist. Together they had travelled around Australia with Christine’s puppetry company, spending much of their time ‘in Lismore and the Adelaide Hills’. Julian attended many schools—thirty-seven he says. His mother says that although he’s super smart, he does get muddled at times—the number of schools was in fact thirteen. At one point they rented a house on an abandoned pineapple farm in Horseshoe Bay at the northern end of Magnetic Island, where they had to ‘slash [their] way to the front door with a machete.’

For the rebellious Christine, Julian’s upbringing was consistent with her view that formal education could instil an unhealthy respect for authority. Julian seemed to thrive. For a boy his age he showed an extraordinary interest in mathematics and even philosophy—remarkable for an eight-year-old. He devoured dozens of books on the subjects. One of his distant relatives in Lismore is quoted as saying, apparently without a sense of the obvious: ‘He was a geeky, smart kid.’ Even at such a young age Julian gave an early indication of what lay ahead for him. His stepfather, Brett Assange, remembers, ‘He always stood up for the underdog’. He had a very good sense of equality and equity and was ‘very angry about people ganging up on other people’.

Julian Assange says he was happy with the peripatetic life. ‘We were travelling and touring around many different places, so this was quite a rich environment.’ He particularly enjoyed the country: ‘I was living like a Tom Sawyer.’ He built his own raft, ‘had other boys steal it and reclaim it’. He also had his own horse. ‘I have no complaints at all about this part of my childhood,’ he told me.

The principal of the Lismore school Assange attended said he is not surprised that Julian Assange was a former pupil. ‘We try to develop free thinkers and people of independent thought here and Julian would be the ultimate example of that,’ he said.

In 1979, Christine and Brett Assange separated. She moved to Lismore and met up with a musician, Keith Hamilton. They had a son, but by 1982 the relationship had broken down.

Christine became involved in a ferocious custody battle and fled to her old haunt, Magnetic Island, with her two boys. Seeking safe sanctuary in Picnic Bay, she rented an apartment on The Esplanade overlooking the flat, sandy beach and remarkably clear azure sea. But the sanctuary didn’t last long.

Julian says he remembers ‘having to move very suddenly’ to avoid detection by Hamilton. For the next five years, Christine and her two sons played a tormented game of hide and seek across Australia. The old days of moving around the countryside began again, but this journey had a very different flavour from the earlier happy-go-lucky odyssey. Just who Keith Hamilton was is still not clear. Julian says he understood during their days in hiding that he was the son of a notorious cult leader, Anne Hamilton-Byrne.

* * *

Anne Hamilton-Byrne led a secretive sect that called itself The Family, or The Great White Brotherhood. At one time she had twenty-eight children. Some of them were hers but most had been adopted, a number of them through false papers. From what has been learned about the sect it would be safe to say that what it did was as close to evil as it’s possible to be.

Hamilton-Byrne was certainly delusional. Not content with being the ‘reincarnation of Jesus Christ’ she suggested she was related to French aristocracy. Her elegant clothes and long flowing hair meant she may have looked the part but, like a great deal of her life, it was built on fantasy.

Anne Hamilton-Byrne was in fact Evelyn Edwards, one of seven children born to a railway engine cleaner in Sale, Victoria. It appears her family had a history of mental illness. Her mother was known for setting fire to her hair and talking to the dead. Other relatives were institutionalised and her aunt suffered from psychiatric problems, too.

In the 1960s Anne Hamilton-Byrne developed an interest in Hatha Yoga, and for a while she taught it in Melbourne. By all accounts the business worked well. Exactly how she started The Family isn’t clear, but like many sects this one had a benign beginning. Its first meetings were held on a property near Ferntree Gully west of Melbourne, owned by the then head of Queen’s College at Melbourne University, Dr Raynor Johnson.

Perhaps Johnson chose the area to settle because it reminded him of his north of England birthplace. Ferntree Gully, with its European-style gardens, is famous for its lack of native vegetation. At between 400 and 500 metres above sea level, it is also one of the wettest suburbs of Melbourne. However, the house had one major benefit—its remoteness from prying eyes.

After retiring from Melbourne University, Johnson began giving lectures to discuss the problems of human spirituality. How he got the crowds in is difficult to imagine, with lectures called ‘The Macrocosm and the Microcosm’, but he did. It was said Dr Johnson’s goal was to ‘understand the meaning of life’ and that ‘he was always ready to help others in their quest’. These lectures are possibly where Hamilton-Byrne got to hear about him, or it might have been because Hamilton-Byrne’s second husband worked for Johnson as a gardener. According to one of Hamilton-Byrne’s ‘children’, she apparently turned up on Johnson’s doorstep one Sunday and soon after, the Family was born.

Its recruits came from a broad section of the community: lawyers, teachers, nurses and doctors swelled the ranks. A particularly strong recruiting ground turned out to be Newhaven private psychiatric hospital in the Melbourne suburb of Kew. The owner was a member of the cult and Anne Hamilton-Byrne was given a place on the board. Patients, often at their most vulnerable, were given experimental treatment as they struggled with their psychiatric illnesses. The treatment included heavy doses of LSD—a drug much favoured by Hamilton-Byrne. The hospital proved to be a highly successful recruitment for the Family.

Hamilton-Byrne bought land next door, naming it after the Johnson’s property Sentiniken Park—Hindu for ‘Peaceful Abode’. She also splashed out a sizeable sum of money for a home on the shores of Lake Eildon. The drive there, along winding roads and through kilometres of rocky and forested countryside, takes about three and a half hours. But every year thousands of holidaymakers believe it’s worth the trip, as they head out of Melbourne eager to enjoy the camping grounds and the fresh mountain air. Set in acres of wooded bushland the house would have made a perfect holiday retreat. But the double-storey, wood-panelled home with panoramic views of the lake would instead be used for hiding children, and much worse.

In Hamilton-Byrne’s mind they were a happy family. The children were dressed alike and had their hair dyed blonde, reinforcing the impression that they were all related. As Victorian police officer Lex De Man (who later investigated the sect) told the Australian Sixty Minutes program: ‘Bleached blonde hair, singing like the Von Trapp family, living out Anne’s fantasy of—in her thoughts, I’m sure—it was something like an Aryan race. Horrific.’

As holiday-makers just a few hundred metres away enjoyed life on the lake, there was no joy for the children. Instead, they were subjected to sadistic attacks. For wetting their beds they were beaten unmercifully with a collection of instruments—pieces of wood with nails and canes specially designed to cut the skin. Sometimes the children were hit in front of the others as a warning. In her book Unseen, Unheard, Unknown (the sect’s motto) Sarah Hamilton-Byrne, taken from her mother at birth, says: ‘We watched them trying to stifle their sobs, trying to be brave. And then, almost inevitably, we watched them break down, howling and screaming for mercy.’ For failing to do a menial task, or for too much weight gain, they were starved; forced to ‘miss’ several meals at a time. A word out of place could mean being sent outside to sleep on the ground in sometimes freezing temperatures.

Yet what the children feared most was something that many cultures celebrate—puberty. They knew that they would be subjected to horrific experiments. Locked in a dark room they were forced to take LSD while Hamilton-Byrne and psychiatrists or doctors who were members of the sect looked on. There they humiliated the children as they struggled to deal with the effects of the hallucinogenic drug, which Anne Hamilton-Byrne said would ‘cleanse their spirit’.

Sometimes Hamilton-Byrne targeted ‘special qualities’ which she called ‘blocks’ to enlightenment. The children were supposed to ‘look at’ these and ‘work on’ them while under the influence of the drug. The effect was terrifying for a fourteen-year-old. Sarah remembers examining her hands in the dimness of the room. ‘They were shining and then the skin seemed to writhe and crawl off my hands like it had become maggots feeding on a corpse.’ Through this drug-induced haze, ‘Anne appeared God-like’ and even ‘said she was Jesus Christ’.

In her twisted logic, Hamilton-Byrne told them the discipline would make them into better human beings. Instead it turned them into tragic and terrified individuals fearful of the world—and psychologically damaged. Only in the past few years have some of the children, now adults, managed to speak about what happened. Little wonder it’s taken them so much time. When they went to the police all those years ago no one believed their stories. They were returned to the Eildon Lake house, and severely beaten. In 1987 police raided the house, but by then Hamilton-Byrne and her husband had fled. For the next six years they stayed one step ahead of the law as agencies from Australia, the United States and Great Britain tried to track them down. Eventually they were arrested by the FBI, hiding out in a Midwest American town, traced after making phone calls to Australia. Extradited to Melbourne they were charged with conspiracy to defraud, perjury and falsely registering the births of unrelated children as their own triplets. The Hamilton-Byrnes pleaded guilty to the lesser charges and were fined a paltry $5000. They were never charged with child abuse, according to Lex De Man, because the victims were ‘so damaged they would never have been able to withstand cross-examination in the witness box’.

The Assange family escaped the devastating impact of The Family. Assange said neither he, nor his mother or half-brother, had ever been involved in the cult. Christine said she could not be completely sure Hamilton was a member of The Family, but he behaved very oddly at times, dyed his hair blond and bore a striking resemblance to Anne Hamilton-Byrne before ‘she had her face lift’. Keith Hamilton had also used the surname Meynel—the same name as Hamilton-Byrne’s supposed favourite poet, Alice Meynel. For Christine, that was more than enough evidence.

During the period they hid, Assange said he was told Hamilton used several different identities. They were forced to change their hiding place, sometimes very suddenly. He says he believed The Family had a large network of people and they ‘always managed to find out where we were’. But the Assange family managed to stay ahead in the chase.

One of many houses Christine rented while they were on the run happened to be across the road from an electronics shop. At just eleven years old, Assange was already showing extraordinary mathematical capabilities. He would go to the shop and write programs on its Commodore 64. One of the first mass-produced computers, the Commodore 64 was the model T Ford of its day. He sharpened his skills, unravelling well-known programs and discovering how they were written. Encouraging her son’s extraordinary capabilities, Christine bought the computer for him. The price of nearly $600 might not be much in today’s money, but back then it was several weeks’ wages. Such was the cost of this computer that Christine had to move the family to cheaper accommodation to pay for it. It was a sacrifice that would have far-reaching effects, something they never could have envisaged as the single mother and her two boys continued their nomadic existence.

Assange had a searing intellect that set him apart from most children. He gave an insight into that life on his blog IQ.org (an eclectic collection of political musings and aphorisms), citing findings that ‘children with IQs up to 150 get along in the ordinary course of school life quite well, achieving excellent marks without serious effort’. But children who rose above an IQ of 170 were liable to regard school with indifference or with positive dislike. Assange had an IQ ‘in excess of 170’ according to a friend. Christine said she understood very well the problems Julian faced as a child with a ‘high level of genius’. He got easily bored and when he suffered from an illness similar to glandular fever she took the opportunity of taking him out of school. For eighteen months he was home-schooled by specialist teachers. His academic...