Assange’s Ecuadoran Apartment

On Thursday, as the diplomatic brawl between Britain and Ecuador intensified, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, remained holed up inside the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. The Embassy, at 3 Hans Crescent, is a small apartment in a red-brick building behind Harrod’s. Assange has been there since June, seeking refuge from Britain’s attempts to extradite him to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning regarding sexual-abuse allegations. The Ecuadoran President, Rafael Correa (whom I interviewed in 2009), granted Assange political asylum. In retaliation, Britain threatened to rescind the diplomatic status of the Embassy, which is quickly becoming the tiniest hotly contested territory since the Falkland Islands, whose relative proximity to Ecuador may help to explain the next round of the drama. “If the measure announced in the British official communication is enacted, it will be interpreted by Ecuador as an unacceptable, unfriendly and hostile act and as an attempt against our sovereignty,” Ecuador’s foreign minister declared. “It would force us to respond. We are not a British colony.”

Walk behind Harrod’s, past a bagpiper and tourists eating Laduree macaroons, and enter into a parallel world, where a man wheels around a speaker blasting songs from the Jam and protesters munch on Pringles out of cans. One man, leaning against a fence, held up a copy of Noam Chomsky’s “Hope and Prospects.” A woman in a leopard-print dress, a pink mini-backpack, and many braids wielded a sign that read “WE ARE ALL ASSANGE!!!!” She had drawn a heart in each corner of the posterboard. “Hopefully they will not literally violate the Embassy,” she said. “It’s not on, and it’s not right.” She said she was a spiritualist, and that she had a feeling about what would happen, but she declined to give her name or to share her premonitions. “We are all Assange,” she said. She allowed me to take her photograph, as long as her sign covered her face.

Jerome Taylor, a reporter with the Independent, had managed to attend a small press briefing that morning, inside the Embassy apartment. (Only a few reporters could fit.) “A couple of nice paintings of parrots, a picture of the President,” Taylor said, of the place. “That’s about it.” Taylor didn’t see Assange, who has said that he fears Sweden, in turn, would extradite him to the United States, but, presumably, he was on the premises. Was he locked in a closet? Hiding in the bathroom? Laid up in bed reading novels? The apartment has a little balcony, set off by a white, filigreed iron railing. You half-expected Assange to pop out and dangle a baby or start singing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.”

“It’s not a big place,” Taylor said. “He’s going to go loco if he has to stay in there much longer.” Assange’s self-confinement presents certain metaphysical questions, recalling Ali Smith’s excellent novel “There but for the,” in which a dinner-party guest excuses himself from the table and never comes back. (He has locked himself in the guest room, and becomes a cause célèbre.) It makes one wonder for what, strictly, a person has to leave his apartment. The best a group of reporters, indulging in a sort of parlor game, could come up with was an organ transplant. To stand on Hans Crescent, today, was to become an instant expert in outlandish escape plans, including the old diplomatic-bag trick. I thought there might be potential for something with a Harrod’s van.

Christina Matta, a Peruvian teacher in a poncho, said that she had decided to come to the Embassy to represent Latin Americans. “Britain should honor its agreements,” she said. “If those international agreements are violated, who can be safe?” (The British government has said that Assange and Ecuador are wrong about the rules of asylum, and that it must honor its treaty commitments to Sweden.)

Milan Kozmanovic, a student from Serbia, who’d been in town for the Olympics, sat on a stoop, with an Anonymous mask at his feet. Many of the protesters were wearing the masks. I asked where he’d got it. “There’s guys selling it,” Kozmanovic said. “He’s a dealer,” he said, indicating a man wrapped in a green flag featuring a man with a question mark for a head—the hacktivist’s poncho.

“I’m the official importer of the International Anonymous flag,” he said. He identified himself, unanonymously, as Martin Houston. He’d done a good business, he said, selling strictly at cost. He had a few left: “A fiver if you want one.”

Photograph by Lauren Collins.