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LONDON
— Julian Assange moves like a hunted man. In a noisy Ethiopian
restaurant in London’s rundown Paddington district, he pitches his voice
barely above a whisper to foil the Western intelligence agencies he
fears.

He demands that his dwindling number of loyalists use
expensive encrypted cellphones and swaps his own as other men change
shirts. He checks into hotels under false names, dyes his hair, sleeps
on sofas and floors, and uses cash instead of credit cards, often
borrowed from friends.

“By being determined to be on this path,
and not to compromise, I’ve wound up in an extraordinary situation,” Mr.
Assange said over lunch last Sunday, when he arrived sporting a woolen
beanie and a wispy stubble and trailing a youthful entourage that
included a filmmaker assigned to document any unpleasant surprises.

In
his remarkable journey to notoriety, Mr. Assange, founder of the
WikiLeaks whistle-blowers’ Web site, sees the next few weeks as his most
hazardous. Now he is making his most brazen disclosure yet: 391,832
secret documents on the Iraq war. He held a news conference in London on
Saturday, saying that the release “constituted the most comprehensive
and detailed account of any war ever to have entered the public record.”

Twelve weeks earlier, he posted on his organization’s Web site some 77,000 classified Pentagon do... >>>