In the 2025 updated edition of The Most Dangerous Man in the World: Julian Assange and His Secret White House Deal for Freedom, Andrew Fowler outlines the details surrounding Assange’s release in June 2024 after 14 years of house arrest and incarceration. Photo: Supplied.
The creator of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, famously said: “One of the best ways to achieve justice is to expose injustice.”
After 14 years of house arrest and incarceration, Assange was finally released from the UK’s top-security Belmarsh Prison in June 2024. The multi-award-winning Australian editor, publisher and activist, who founded WikiLeaks in 2006, turned 54 on 3 July.
He ran Wikileaks, a website that published many confidential or restricted official reports related to war, spying and corruption. In early April 2010, hardly anyone had heard of Julian Assange. By December he was one of the most famous people on Earth, with powerful enemies and passionate friends.
In this 2025 updated version of The Most Dangerous Man in the World: Julian Assange and His Secret White House Deal for Freedom, award-winning investigative journalist Andrew Fowler details how the WikiLeaks founder returned to Australia, a free man, on 26 June after a long-running US legal battle.
The Most Dangerous Man in the World was first published in 2011 and updated in 2012 and 2020. Fowler’s interview with Assange in 2010 for the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent won him the New York Festival Gold Medal.
Precise. Explicit. Distinct. From the opening page, there’s no room for ambiguity in Fowler’s description about that defining moment when agreement was reached, ensuring a certain legal resolution for Assange on 24 June, 2024. There’s a high degree of exactitude, with specific and comprehensive information. It makes for fascinating, absorbing reading.
Instead of serving a possible 175-year jail sentence, Assange walked free. Years of campaigning by his family and Australian politicians from across the political spectrum had finally paid off: Assange’s plea bargain with the US Department of Justice produced the legal deal of the century.
We take ringside seats as Fowler takes us inside the negotiations with the White House, revealing a startling story of false hope, courage, resolve and the extraordinary resilience of the person Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg called ‘’The Most Dangerous Man in the World’’.
What changed then-US President Joe Biden’s mind after years of appeals and hearings? When WikiLeaks revealed evidence of American war crimes in Iraq, Biden had called Assange a “high-tech terrorist”. Why did Biden now believe the time was right to end the pursuit and cut a deal?
We get to explore different angles of this issue, consider various viewpoints and gain a multifaceted understanding. Picture this: Central London’s Hyde Park Gate, at the home of the Australian High Commissioner Stephen Smith, and “he held the passport of the world’s most famous prisoner, his fellow Australian citizen, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Everything went to plan on that day – 24 June 2024 – and he did need that passport.”
It was an early start to the day. Three of the world’s most prominent lawyers would be at his gate at 6 am.
“Smith welcomed the three barristers: Gareth Peirce, who had represented Assange during his interminable UK court hearings; Barry Pollack, his US attorney; and Jennifer Robinson, who had been by Assange’s side since he became a US target for exposing evidence of Washington’s war crimes in 2010 …
“Twenty kilometres away at Belmarsh Prison on the banks of the River Thames in East London, Julian Assange was already up. The prison guards had woken him at 2am … Assange had been imprisoned there for more than five years, since he was arrested in 2019 – dragged out of London’s Ecuadorian Embassy, where he had been given political asylum in 2012.”
Smith and the legal team went to meet Assange to go through several legal processes.
In the introduction to the 2025 edition, Fowler provides a behind-the-scenes detailed narrative of assistance from people in high places, government support and lack of action, ingenious plans, interventionism, non-intervention by politicians and a concerted campaign to save Assange. He alludes to “the hatred for Assange … his crime wasn’t that he’s killed anyone — he’d simply pointed the finger at those who had … Assange’s prosecution had been a demonstrable case of payback.”
He had been charged with 17 breaches of the US Espionage Act of 1917 for what national security journalists do every day: reveal unpleasant truths about the actions of executive government.
The whole operation surrounding the spectacular plea bargain to free Assange, struck at the highest levels of governments, needed to be kept secret. His landmark release agreement has been described as both a relief for Assange and his supporters, and a controversial resolution that has sparked debate about press freedom and national security.
The Most Dangerous Man in the World: Julian Assange and His Secret White House Deal for Freedom, by Andrew Fowler, Melbourne University Publishing, $34.99
