How Julian Assange could seduce even you

Kirsty Wigglesworth / AP file

Not long ago, British journalist Heather Brooke watched one of the “the biggest government information leaks in history” unfold right before her eyes. She interacted with the scandal’s key players — including WikiLeaks’ infamous founder Julian Assange — and quietly investigated the story. Now she has published a first-person narrative of the events — and revealed to the world just how the platinum-haired man at the center of the tale could seduce us all.

Brooke’s insider take on the man behind WikiLeaks became available in the form of an ebook entitled ”Assange Agonistes” earlier today. It can be purchased as an Amazon Kindle Single for $1.99.

For reasons that I can barely understand right now, I downloaded a copy of this book. Its introduction made me yawn, so I quickly skimmed through the rest of it in an attempt to see if the whole thing was completely dull. It didn’t take long for things to get odd:

Julian could be charming, he could be brilliant, but what was in his soul?

I re-read the line, flipped back to the cover page of the ebook, checked that I downloaded the correct title.

This was a strange way to describe what WikiLeaks’ second-in-command, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, happened to be thinking as he worked alongside Assange, was it not?

I shrugged and kept reading. Brooke was preparing to recount the details of her first meeting with Assange.

He smiles shyly, looking up through his lashes, like a coquette.

At this point I was beginning to quote lines from the book to one of my co-workers. She questioned whether I was reading a romance novel or some sort of fan fiction. I wondered the same, but Brooke is an award-winning journalist — not a dreamy-eyed school girl. She couldn’t possibly been seduced by a subject’s charming demeanor.

When he has his eyes on me — as he did just now when he was saying that fear exists largely in our own minds — I have the sense he’s looking right into my soul. The teenage girl in me swoons madly, but the investigative journalist concludes that the detached/intense thing is a technique he’s honed after years of practice to get people to open up and five away their secrets. I have to admit it’s pretty effective.

Or … maybe I was wrong.

There were references to Assange’s child-like smiles, his “catlike and aloof” appearance, his “direct and intense” stares, his “long pale fingers,” his “silken hair,” the way his speech has the quality of a “siren’s song,” the “deadly sonorous” nature of his voice, and so on.

Brooke went as far as describing how she questioned Assange about his hair color:

Is that his real hair color or is it bleached?

He begins to spin out some stories. “Yes, it’s real. I used to have it down my back. When I was traveling in Vietnam it got very annoying because everywhere I went people would come up to me and want to touch it. So I decided the next time I went traveling in Asia, I’d dye it black. So guess what? I went to Japan and did exactly this only to discover that in Japan people dye their hair all sorts of crazy colors and in the manga tradition the male hero usually has white hair.”

He does have a comic book hero look. When I ask if it’s always been white, he says no. “It went white as a result of a childhood experiment with a cathode ray tube that went wrong.

I recall the blue superhero in “Watchmen” and wonder if he’s populating his biography with comic-book references.

It felt surreal to watch a seemingly level-headed investigative journalist be so very aware of the tactics and techniques Assange was using yet fall for them anyway. She kept describing her skepticism when it came to his words, but then romanticized him as being “very much like the Scarlet Pimpernel.”

She humored bizarre interactions — including one in which he questioned whether she had any maternal instinct after she refused to bring him chicken soup and cookies in bed while he had a fever — and continued to engage him as a source. She found herself pressed against a brick wall by the man as he described life in London, and she listened to him recount various female conquests.

Despite the fascinating nature of the event Brooke was describing — the actual scandal — and the role Assange played in it, it’s difficult to focus on the narrative without feeling distracted by how the reporter was affected by her subject. And at some point she realized this, too:

He sighs. “I just have so much to do.”

“Yeah, it’s a tough life being a messiah.” I joke. There’s a pause.

“Will you be my Mary Magdalene, Heather? And bathe my feet at the cross?”

This is a new one on me and now it’s my turn to pause. What does a person say to such a question? At that time I did genuinely like Julian. When I’d met him at the conference he was like a bolt of lightning. But even so — foot-bathing? I’d reached a point with Julian where the personal and the professional had begun to blur. He’s the world’s most famous leaker; I’m a freedom of information campaigner, so we’ve a lot to talk about. But he was unsettling, even bafflingly, unaware of any notion of personal boundaries.

And that’s all there is to it, isn’t it? By refusing to acknowledge personal or legal boundaries, Julian Assange could stand to seduce and charm anyone and anything — from the public to the journalists.

Related stories:

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• Official WikiLeaks t-shirt designs revealed
• Assange beats MasterCard with its own ad

Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She’s obsessed with Twitter and loves to be liked on Facebook. Oh, and she can be found on Google+, too.

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