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100 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS
In November 2010, however, he ran into a legal problem in
Sweden. A judge in Stockholm ordered his detention on suspicion
of rape, sexual molestation, and unlawful coercion. He denied the
charges but was arrested in London on a European arrest warrant. In
December, he was released on a $312,700 bail deposit (supplied by
his supporters) and confined to Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, England.
While awaiting the outcome of the extradition proceedings, he lived
there with Sarah Harrison, his twenty-eight-year-old deputy at
WikiLeaks. A graduate of the elite Sevenoaks School in Kent, Harri-
son served as Assange’s liaison with the outside world. Although she
was Officially given the title “investigative editor” of WikiLeaks, she
worked so closely with Assange during this period that the British
press carried stories saying she was his paramour. Harrison worked
on a WikiLeaks documentary titled Mediastan, which concerned
WikiLeaks’s exposure of U.S. secret operations in Russia and other
parts of the former Soviet Union. It was a project that took her to
Russia and provided her with a multi-entry Russian visa.
In June 2012, after the extradition order was upheld, Assange
® jumped bail and fled to the Ecuador embassy in London. For the next ©
year, his only visible means of income was a weekly program from
the embassy. It was sponsored in 2012 by RT television, a Moscow-
based, English-language news channel funded by the Russian gov-
ernment, which would also finance and release Mediastan. This
sponsorship suggests that the Russian government saw potential
value in the document-gathering activities of WikiLeaks.
Snowden telephoned Assange at his refuge at the Ecuador
embassy on June 10, 2013. According to Assange, Snowden needed
help for his exit plan. He wanted Assange to use WikiLeaks’s
“resources” to get him out of Hong Kong. Assange considered it a
surprising request, because Snowden had not given any of the stolen
documents to WikiLeaks. In their discussion, according to Assange,
Snowden claimed that one reason he decided to take the secret NSA
documents was the brutal treatment of Bradley Manning after he
was arrested in 2010 by the U.S. government. “Snowden told me
they had abused Manning in a way that contributed to his decision
to become a whistle-blower,” Assange said in an interview in 2015.
If Manning’s mistreatment was Snowden’s motive, it was a sharp
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