Assange a scruffy, freakish Peter Pan, say collaborators

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange smells "as if he hadn't bathed in days", sometimes suddenly skips in the street like a child and is "elusive, manipulative and volatile".

This is the verdict on the head of the world's most controversial website from some editors and reporters who have worked with him.

Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times - one of a handful of newspapers that collaborated with the website in the publication of leaked documents last year - has detailed what he characterises as the 39-year-old's erratic appearance and behaviour.

"He was alert but dishevelled, like a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-coloured sports coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn't bathed in days," a reporter wrote to Keller.

In extracts from an e-book, Open Secrets: Wikileaks, War and American Diplomacy, to be published tomorrow, Keller writes that Assange had "a bit of Peter Pan in him".

His behaviour included "freakish" shouting outbursts and breaking into a skip after dining with colleagues. "One night, when they were all walking down the street after dinner, Assange suddenly started skipping ahead of the group. Schmitt and Goetz [journalists for the New York Times and Spiegel] stared, speechless. Then, just as suddenly, Assange stopped, got back in step with them and returned to the conversation he had interrupted ... The reporters came to think of Assange as smart and well educated, extremely adept technologically but arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous."

Those working with WikiLeaks also suspected their email accounts had been hacked into after altercations with the website, according to Keller. He writes: "At a point when relations between the news organisations and WikiLeaks were rocky, at least three people associated with this project had inexplicable activity in their email that suggested someone was hacking into their accounts."

Assange is in the UK awaiting a two-day extradition hearing over sexual assault charges in Sweden. A spokesman for WikiLeaks said Assange would not comment on the criticisms, but the website posted on its Twitter account: "NYTimes does another self-serving smear. Facts wrong, top to bottom. Dark day for US journalism."

Tomorrow all three of the publications that worked closely with WikiLeaks are releasing books giving their version of events. With the German magazine Der Spiegel and the Guardian, the New York Times gained early access to material held by WikiLeaks.

Judging from extracts published so far, the most critical book comes from writers at the New York Times, which fell out with Assange in October after publication of the Iraq War Diaries. Assange claimed the paper didn't publish the material in its entirety and made too many concessions to the White House before going to print.

- INDEPENDENT