In November 2010, however, he ran into a legal problem in

100 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS In November 2010, however, he ran into a legal problem in Sweden. A judge in Stockholm ordered his detention on suspicion of rape, sexual molestation, and unlawful coercion. He denied the charges but was arrested in London on a European arrest warrant. In December, he was released on a $312,700 bail deposit (supplied by his supporters) and confined to Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, England. While awaiting the outcome of the extradition proceedings, he lived there with Sarah Harrison, his twenty-eight-year-old deputy at WikiLeaks. A graduate of the elite Sevenoaks School in Kent, Harri- son served as Assange’s liaison with the outside world. Although she was Officially given the title “investigative editor” of WikiLeaks, she worked so closely with Assange during this period that the British press carried stories saying she was his paramour. Harrison worked on a WikiLeaks documentary titled Mediastan, which concerned WikiLeaks’s exposure of U.S. secret operations in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. It was a project that took her to Russia and provided her with a multi-entry Russian visa. In June 2012, after the extradition order was upheld, Assange ® jumped bail and fled to the Ecuador embassy in London. For the next © year, his only visible means of income was a weekly program from the embassy. It was sponsored in 2012 by RT television, a Moscow- based, English-language news channel funded by the Russian gov- ernment, which would also finance and release Mediastan. This sponsorship suggests that the Russian government saw potential value in the document-gathering activities of WikiLeaks. Snowden telephoned Assange at his refuge at the Ecuador embassy on June 10, 2013. According to Assange, Snowden needed help for his exit plan. He wanted Assange to use WikiLeaks’s “resources” to get him out of Hong Kong. Assange considered it a surprising request, because Snowden had not given any of the stolen documents to WikiLeaks. In their discussion, according to Assange, Snowden claimed that one reason he decided to take the secret NSA documents was the brutal treatment of Bradley Manning after he was arrested in 2010 by the U.S. government. “Snowden told me they had abused Manning in a way that contributed to his decision to become a whistle-blower,” Assange said in an interview in 2015. If Manning’s mistreatment was Snowden’s motive, it was a sharp | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 100 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019588