How Russia often benefits when Julian Assange reveals the West's secrets

Julian Assange was in classic didactic form, holding forth on the topic that consumes him — the perfidy of big government and especially of the United States.

Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks, rose to global fame in 2010 for releasing huge caches of highly classified U.S. government communications that exposed the underbelly of its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and its sometimes cynical diplomatic maneuvering around the world. But in a televised interview last September, it was clear that he still had plenty to say about "The World According to US Empire," the subtitle of his latest book, "The WikiLeaks Files."

From the cramped confines of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he was granted asylum four years ago amid a legal imbroglio, Assange proffered a vision of America as superbully: a nation that has achieved imperial power by proclaiming allegiance to principles of human rights while deploying its military-intelligence apparatus in "pincer" formation to "push" countries into doing its bidding, and punishing people like him who dare to speak the truth.

Notably absent from Assange's analysis, however, was criticism of another world power, Russia, or its president, Vladimir V. Putin, who has hardly lived up to WikiLeaks' ideal of transparency. Putin's government has cracked down hard on dissent — spying on, jailing, and, critics charge, sometimes assassinating opponents while consolidating control over the news media and internet. If Assange appreciated the irony of the moment — denouncing censorship in an interview on Russia Today, the Kremlin-controlled English-language propaganda channel — it was not readily apparent.

Now, Assange and WikiLeaks are back in the spotlight, roiling the geopolitical landscape with new disclosures and a promise of more to come.

In July, the organization released nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails suggesting that the party had conspired with Hillary Clinton's campaign to undermine her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders. Assange — who has been openly critical of Clinton — has promised further disclosures that could upend her campaign against the Republican nominee, Donald Trump. Separately, WikiLeaks announced that it would soon release some of the crown jewels of American intelligence: a "pristine" set of cyberspying codes.

U.S. officials say they believe with a high degree of confidence that the Democratic Party material was hacked by the Russian government, and suspect that the codes may have been stolen by the Russians as well. That raises a question: Has WikiLeaks become a laundering machine for compromising material gathered by Russian spies? And more broadly, what precisely is the relationship between Assange and Putin's Kremlin?

Those questions are made all the more pointed by Russia's prominent place in the U.S. presidential election campaign. Putin, who clashed repeatedly with Clinton when she was secretary of state, has publicly praised Trump, who has returned the compliment, calling for closer ties to Russia and speaking favorably of Putin's annexation of Crimea.

[A powerful Russian weapon: The spread of false stories]

From the outset of WikiLeaks, Assange said he was motivated by a desire to use "cryptography to protect human rights," and would focus on authoritarian governments like Russia's.

But a New York Times examination of WikiLeaks' activities during Assange's years in exile found a different pattern: Whether by conviction, convenience or coincidence, WikiLeaks' document releases, along with many of Assange's statements, have often benefited Russia, at the expense of the West.

Among U.S. officials, the emerging consensus is that Assange and WikiLeaks probably have no direct ties to Russian intelligence services. But they say that, at least in the case of the Democrats' emails, Moscow knew it had a sympathetic outlet in WikiLeaks, where intermediaries could drop pilfered documents in the group's anonymized digital inbox.

In an interview on Wednesday with The Times, Assange said Clinton and the Democrats were "whipping up a neo-McCarthyist hysteria about Russia." There is "no concrete evidence" that what WikiLeaks publishes comes from intelligence agencies, he said, even as he indicated that he would happily accept such material.

But given WikiLeaks' limited resources and the hurdles of translation, Assange said, why focus on Russia, which he described as a "bit player on the world stage," compared with countries like China and the United States? In any event, he said, Kremlin corruption is an old story. "Every man and his dog is criticizing Russia," he said. "It's a bit boring, isn't it?"

Since its inception, WikiLeaks has succeeded spectacularly on some fronts, uncovering indiscriminate killing, hypocrisy and corruption, and helping spark the Arab Spring.

Recent events, though, have left some transparency advocates wondering if WikiLeaks has lost its way. There is a big difference between publishing materials from a whistle-blower like Chelsea Manning — the soldier who gave WikiLeaks its war log and diplomatic cable scoops — and accepting information, even indirectly, from a foreign intelligence service seeking to advance its own powerful interests, said John Wonderlich, the executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a group devoted to government transparency.

"They're just aligning themselves with whoever gives them information to get attention or revenge against their enemies," Wonderlich said. "They're welcoming governments to hack into each other and disrupt each other's democratic processes, all on a pretty weak case for the public interest."

Others see Assange assuming an increasingly blinkered approach to the world that, coupled with his own secrecy, has left them disillusioned.

"The battle for transparency was supposed to be global; at least Assange claimed that at the beginning," said Andrei A. Soldatov, an investigative journalist who has written extensively about Russia's security services.

"It is strange that this principle is not being applied to Assange himself and his dealings with one particular country, and that is Russia," Soldatov said. "He seems to think that one may compromise a lot fighting a bigger evil."

In late November 2010, U.S. officials announced an investigation of WikiLeaks; Clinton, whose State Department was scrambled by what became known as "Cablegate," vowed to take "aggressive" steps to hold those responsible to account.

The next month, Assange was arrested by the London police to face questioning by the Swedes, who he feared would turn him over to the Americans. Out on bail, he holed up and fought extradition at a Georgian country house owned by a supporter, Vaughan Smith, who said in an interview that he believed Assange to be the victim of an "intense online bullying and disinformation" campaign.

One day after Assange's arrest, the Russian president appeared at a news conference with the French prime minister. Brushing off a questioner who suggested that the diplomatic cables portrayed Russia as undemocratic, Putin used the opportunity to bash the West.

"As far as democracy goes, it should be a complete democracy. Why then did they put Mr. Assange behind bars?" he asked. "There's an American saying: He who lives in a glass house shouldn't throw stones."

It was the first of several times that Putin would take up Assange's cause. He has called the charges against Assange "politically motivated" and declared that the WikiLeaks founder is being "persecuted for spreading the information he received from the U.S. military regarding the actions of the USA in the Middle East, including Iraq."

In January 2011, the Kremlin issued Assange a visa, and one Russian official suggested that he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Then, in April 2012, with WikiLeaks' funding drying up — under U.S. pressure, Visa and MasterCard had stopped accepting donations — Russia Today began broadcasting a show called "The World Tomorrow" with Assange as the host. How much he or WikiLeaks was paid for the 12 episodes remains unclear.

But on June 19, 2012, Assange's narrative quickly took a different turn. He broke bail after losing an appeal against extradition to Sweden and was granted asylum in the tiny embassy of Ecuador in London.

One year later, a man who would soon eclipse Assange in terms of whistle-blowing fame boarded a plane in Hong Kong. His name was Edward J. Snowden, and he was a National Security Agency contractor-turned-fugitive, having stunned the world and strained U.S. alliances by leaking documents that revealed a U.S.-led network of global surveillance programs.

Snowden had not given his thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. Still, it was at the suggestion of Assange that the flight Snowden boarded on June 23, 2013, accompanied by his WikiLeaks colleague Sarah Harrison, was bound for Moscow, where Snowden remains today after the United States canceled his passport en route.

In fact, worried that he would be seen as a spy, Snowden had hoped merely to pass through Russia on his way to South America, Assange later recounted, a plan he had not fully endorsed. Russia, he believed, could best protect Snowden from a CIA kidnapping, or worse.

"Now I thought, and in fact advised Edward Snowden, that he would be safest in Moscow," Assange told the news program Democracy Now.

During his time isolated in the Ecuadorean Embassy, under constant surveillance, his instinctive mistrust of the West hardened even as he became increasingly numb to the abuses of the Kremlin, which he viewed as a "bulwark against Western imperialism," said one supporter, who like many others asked for anonymity for fear of angering Assange.

Another person who collaborated with WikiLeaks in the past added: "He views everything through the prism of how he's treated. America and Hillary Clinton have caused him trouble, and Russia never has."

The result has been a "one-dimensional confrontation with the USA," Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who before quitting WikiLeaks in 2010 was one of Assange's closest partners, has said.