I suppose some of that came from knowing my predicament was being scrutinised. I knew the world was watching and that made my plight worthwhile: it serves the cause to be the one visibly taking the flak. Some part of me was horrified at the idea of being branded a criminal for doing our work, but I knew enough to appreciate it could only highlight the issue of justice. There’s no bravery involved in such a position, only cunning. I was asked to sign in my personal belongings, which amounted, on this good day, to a single Biro pen and about £250 in cash. I was instructed to strip, which I did, immediately donning prison garments of a grey pullover and grey pants. Oscar Wilde, when he was transferred to the same prison in 1895, created a noble stir when he found that his waistcoat was missing. ‘Pray pardon my ebullition of feeling,’ he said to the warder. I’ll try to keep the words ‘like Wilde’ out of this, and say nothing about my own poor stock of waistcoats, but the Irishman couldn’t fail to come to mind in that rank Victorian slammer. My lawyer later said I had been languishing in Oscar’s cell: I’m not sure, but the spirit of the man, his fight against prejudice, was indwelling. He was treated horribly and kept in conditions as inhumane as they were heartbreaking, and I have to say it was other prisoners, past and present ones, who were on my mind at Wandsworth.
I thought a lot about Bradley, the young American soldier who was suffering harsh treatment in an American jail, summarily condemned, in my opinion, for allegedly raising the alarm on an illegal war. He was on my mind a great deal in the confines of the cell.
One of the things that happens almost automatically is that you begin to pace up and down. Like a panther in a cage, you have to find an outlet for constrained action. I walked up and down and was sort of planning what to do, trying to get attuned physiologically to this small space. I knew it was ugly and terrible in there, but it wouldn’t be for long. You tell yourself these things and try to focus. On the outside world, as they call it, my lawyers were working overtime to get me out, but their world seemed light years away as I walked in circles and felt, like never before, the meaning and the substance of the word ‘solitary’.
To reduce the noise, and maybe the cold, my cell’s previous occupant had covered the air-vent with a piece of A4 paper. Later, when the warders turned the lights out, I realised that the worst thing, after all, was to be out of communication. I live for the arts of connection, and I suddenly knew how hard it was going to be in there, not hearing, and not being heard. Especially hard given the position of WikiLeaks: we were engaged in communications warfare with a number of opponents, and these were situations that needed directing on an hourly basis. When the light came up in the morning, I knew the first thing I had to do was discover how to make calls. Surely they’d make allowances and give a guy some Internet access? I know, not likely. But my default position is always to hope that the impossible is only the impossible until your imagination proves otherwise. So I kept thinking and kept hoping and eventually I pressed the emergency button.
They allowed me to see the Governor. He decided I should be in the Onslow Wing with the ‘at risk’ prisoners. Several storeys high and several cells deep, the wing has its own culture within the prison. It seemed I should go there because, in the Governor’s opinion, I was at risk of being attacked by other prisoners. It was a strange assumption, because the prisoners I met were quite clearly on my side. In Onslow, the landings were filled with rapists and paedophiles, crime bosses, the occasional celebrity. I was alone in the cell and still had no phone allowance. No phone and no writing materials and no chance of talking with my colleagues. I stood in the cell feeling defiant but ill equipped.
The cell was down in the basement, about two metres by four, with a bed, a washbasin, a toilet, a desk, a closet and off-white walls. Much of the wall space was taken up by a drab grey plastic structure that formed the water and ventilation system for the washbasin and toilet. These were designed to minimise the possibility of self-harm, but this also meant that everything was dull, smoothed off, and hidden. There were no taps in the washbasin, no flush handle on the toilet, no cistern. Everything was automated or operated by touch. There was a medical emergency button on the wall by the bed and a curtain to pull around the toilet. At the top of one wall was a small window, with bars across it at four-centimetre intervals, that looked out onto the prison exercise yard, a small space enclosed by a high mesh fence, topped with layers of razor wire. Sometimes in the mornings I would see the legs of prisoners in the yard passing by the window, hear shouts, snatches of jokes and conversation. Above the cell door an infrared surveillance camera looked into the room, armed with a bank of LED lights that glowed a dull red throughout the night, constantly watching. The cell door was unmarked apart from a single spyhole in its centre, covered on the outside by a metal flap.
The other prisoners were curious about me, so the metal flap on the cell door was constantly being flipped up as they looked in to see what I was doing. There’s a film of Robert Bresson’s called A Man Escaped, a beautiful film, but really a feat of sound engineering, where a spoon struck against brickwork can seem orchestral. Every sound was like that in Wandsworth: full of echo and emptiness. The metal flap scraped as it was lifted and I sensed an eye. Yes. They wanted to see what I was up to in my cell. Or what I was like. No situation nowadays can be considered immune from the celebrity-seeing eye, and soon there were whispers at the cell door. Whispers at volume. ‘Be careful who you speak to.’ ‘You’ll be okay.’ ‘Don’t trust anyone.’ ‘Don’t worry about anything.’
I felt I was in a kind of deviant’s Barbarella. I wanted to be out doing my work as a journalist, not stuck here playing the martyr, and my life’s training had made it impossible for me to stomach the bureaucratic hell of prison and the stigmatising horror of being reduced by blind authority. Every hour of your time in prison is a kind of guerrilla warfare against encroaching paperwork and stultifying rules. In just applying to buy a postage stamp you risk hypothermia in a snowstorm of forms. After they moved me to the separation unit, I continued with my campaign to make calls. It was Stalinist. It took me most of my time there to win a phone call to my lawyer. To make such a call you had to be calling an approved number on a previously submitted list of numbers and you had to have phone credit. There were two types of credit, domestic and foreign. Different forms for that. And the forms were both hard to get hold of and hard to get attended to. I filled in the same forms so many times that the process became like the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Bleak House. Unending. I then had to supply the name, telephone number, address and birth date of the person I wanted to call. You had to fill out a form to get a PIN corresponding to your domestic telephone account and another PIN corresponding to your foreign account. It went from being a farce to being a nightmare to being a form of torture. The forms kept coming back and forth or being lost. Once you finally get to the phone you’re only allowed to speak for ten minutes. Then you can’t make another call for five minutes. They record all the calls except the ones made to lawyers, but further steps have to be taken to prove the speaker is a lawyer. As part of this approval effort the prison will only accept office numbers, not mobiles, despite the fact that lawyers spend their lives on mobiles. And so it goes on, a Kafkaesque miasma of passive aggression and hindrance.
In the end I got to speak to my mother and to my lawyer. I also tried to speak to Daniel Ellsberg, the man who brought the Pentagon Papers to the world. He wasn’t in. Turns out he was off chaining himself to the gates of the White House. (They removed his handcuffs to make it impossible.) ‘G’day, Dan,’ I said to his voicemail. ‘Just dropping you a note from the bottom of a Victorian slammer. The message is to other people: “Wish you were here.”’
As the days wore on documents began to appear under my cell door, some of them delivered at night, ushered in by whispers. A lot of them were newspaper clippings or articles downloaded and annotated by the prisoner. ‘Is Rape Rampant in Gender-Equal Sweden?’ said one article. Conspiracy abounds in the confines of a prison, but so does lawyerly empathy: the incarcerated ones have experience, obviously, and many are tough on themselves and tough on the system that surrounds them, taking it for granted that the prison culture can seek to exploit you. Many among my traffic of correspondents – my placers of things under the door – were veritable experts in the miscarriage of justice, which soothed me in the wee small hours. It would be an
