A documentary film, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, is making waves in the United States. It debuted in the Sundance film festival, will be screened at the Sydney film festival on June 12 and expected to be released widely in July. Already running in three theatres of New York, the spy thriller made by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, is based on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his secretive module of collecting information that has embarrassed many governments around the world over the last few years.
But this is just one plot of the movie. Outside this plot lies another plot to this story, led by a ‘born-again’ activist – Assange’s once-ally-turned-turncoat. This is none other than Jemima Khan, the former wife of Pakistan cricketer Imran Khan, who is also executive producer of the movie.
Jemima admits that the movie is not as anti-Assange as his supporters are portraying it to be. But the film has a character with two distinct characteristics, much like Assange: first as a crusader and then, towards the end, a “greedy, paranoid and egomaniacal” man, as one movie review indicates.
At one side, when Imran Khan was taking on the corrupt government in Pakistan, her former wife (both are still good friends) was on a different mission. In the heat and dusty alleys of interior Pakistan as spring gave way to early summer, the cricketer-turned-politician held and addressed hundreds of rallies as the elections drew closer, even getting injured in the process toward the end. Thousands of miles apart, his former wife was dissecting a different tale, questioning the ‘crusader of openness’ through her writing and speaking to media.
In New Statesman, where Jemima also works as an associate editor, she wrote in February how Assange’s journey has gone from “admiration to demoralisation” (read the article here). Scathing in her attack, the Birtish heiress wrote about Wikileaks: “(It) has been guilty of the same obfuscation and misinformation as those it sought to expose, while its supporters are expected to follow, unquestioningly, in blinkered, cultish devotion.”
Over last few months, several allies of Assange have left him as he remains holed in Ecuador embassy in London.
Jemima did not start as unsympathetic toward Assange: she poured thousands of pounds for his bail. “I decided to stand bail for him because I believed that through WikiLeaks he was speaking truth to power and had made many enemies,” she wrote in the article. But it was while making the film that Jemima saw a different face of Assange. Like many across the globe, she had taken him to be a champion of transparency but he turned a more complicated subject than she had expected.
Assange asked for $1 million for the interview during filmmaking.
As things turned out, he became ‘fall guy’ of the same transparency he championed. In the article, Jemima comes across as furious about Assange not exceeding to the demand of extradition to Sweden, where he faces charges of rape and sexual assault on two women. “The women in question have human rights, too, and need resolution. Assange’s noble cause and his wish to avoid a US court does not trump their right to be heard in a Swedish court,” Jemima wrote.
At a time the world is undergoing a crisis, it definitely needs a hero but de we need Assange turning into another Australian ‘L. Ron Hubbard’, where Jemima has left us to ponder.
