Assange Slammed as Paranoid Megalomaniac by Ex Ally

A file photograph dated 23 October 2010 shows Wikileaks founder Julian Assange during his press conference in London, Britain. Photo by EPA/BGNES

A paranoid, power-hungry and megalomaniac man, who can not tolerate any criticism from his subordinates – this is the real Julian Assange, according to WikiLeaks former spokesman.

In his memoir "Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website" Daniel Domscheit-Berg tells about the behind-the-scene goings-on during his three years as Assange's spokesman.

"It was almost funny" that Assange "had adopted the language of the powermongers he claimed to be combating," writes Domscheit-Berg in his book, as quoted by the Washington Post.

Although he was very enthusiastic and supportive of Assange's whistle-blowing mission at the beginning Domscheit-Berg left the organization dismayed by Assange's paranoid resistance to transparency, lack of political neutrality, and addiction to concentrating power in his own hands — anti-democratic vices that Wiki­Leaks was founded to oppose.

A German open-source activist and network security designer, Domscheit-Berg met Assange in Berlin in 2007 and soon became his closest colleague in the small organization.

He remembers WikiLeaks's early whistle-blowing successes, such as its publication in 2008 of hundreds of documents from the Swiss banking house Julius Bar, exposing the tax shelters of the rich.

According to Domscheit-Berg however from the beginning, Assange and his tiny staff were unwilling or unable to review carefully the digital document dumps they received from anonymous sources and to separate genuine whistle-blowing material from private information whose disclosure had no clear public benefits. Domscheit-Berg regrets that WikiLeaks published the hacked e-mails of Sarah Palin, even though they contained private photos of her children but nothing scandalous or newsworthy.

"I thought the leak of Palin's hacked email was weak and of questionable relevance," he writes. "We became increasingly brazen."

Domscheit-Berg claims that Assange was more interested in attracting publicity (and women) than in making careful determinations about newsworthiness.

Although he praises Assange for being "imaginative" and "energetic," he ultimately finds him "so paranoid, so power-hungry, so megalomaniac" that he adopted the cultish secrecy, financial opacity and self-promoting marketing strategies of the people he fought against.

A nomad and eccentric who wore two pairs of dirty pants and worked off a laptop while sleeping on borrowed couches, Assange was constantly fleeing from real and imagined enemies, objecting to Domscheit-Berg's basement apartment because he feared his critics could peer through the windows. At the same time, Assange was contemptuous of his American supporters, such as the feminist Naomi Wolf and the filmmaker Michael Moore, who donated the bail money that secured his release from prison on rape charges.

He ran WikiLeaks as a cult of personality, one that reminded Domscheit-Berg of the Church of Scientology, whose rituals they exposed. Although an anarchist who believed that those in power should be brought low, Assange refused to tolerate any criticism from his subordinates. Once Domscheit-Berg began to challenge him, their friendship fell apart. "Do not challenge leadership in times of crisis" became Assange's favorite slogan.

Later, when Assange tried to kick him out of Wiki­Leaks, he gave as a reason "Disloyalty, Insubordination and Destabilization in Times of Crisis." These concepts were taken from the Espionage Act of 1917 — the same law that the Obama administration is considering invoking to charge Assange with betraying military secrets.

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