Julian Assange has complained he will have to buy a copy of his own newly-published autobiography to find out its contents after he failed to block its release.
The WikiLeaks founder tried to cancel his contract for the memoir after reading a first draft, but publishers Canongate Books went ahead with its publication today against his wishes.
In the book, Mr Assange (40) suggests that rape allegations against him could have been concocted by the US government and says he knew that “forces” would eventually trap him.
He dismisses claims that he sexually assaulted two women in Sweden in August last year, writing: “I may be a chauvinist pig of some sort but I am no rapist.”
Mr Assange condemned Edinburgh-based Canongate’s publication of the book, billed on the cover as an “unauthorised autobiography”, describing it as a case of “screwing people over to make a buck”.
He said the published memoir was a “work in progress” written by his Scottish ghost-writer Andrew O’Hagan, based on interviews and stressed it was “entirely uncorrected or fact-checked by me”.
In a strongly-worded statement, he added: “I will have to buy ‘my autobiography’ in order to learn the extent of the errors and inaccuracies of the content of the book, but the damage is done.”
Mr Assange, an Australian former computer hacker currently on bail in Britain as he fights extradition to Sweden on the sexual assault charges, made headlines around the world with revelations from secret US military files and diplomatic cables released by his controversial whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.
He claims in the book that a contact in a Western intelligence agency told him just before the rape allegations emerged that the US government was considering dealing with him “illegally”.
The source allegedly said Washington officials were discussing everything from planting drugs or child pornography to embroiling him in “allegations of immoral conduct”.
Around the same time a Swedish journalist friend warned him of the danger of a “honey trap”, highlighting the way Israel’s Mossad spy agency used an attractive agent to lure nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu from Britain to Italy in 1986.
Mr Assange admits in the memoir that he had consensual sex with the two women in Sweden and that he “wasn’t a reliable boyfriend, or even a very courteous sleeping partner”.
But he stresses: “I did not rape those women and cannot imagine anything that happened between us that would make them think so, except malice after the fact, a joint plan to entrap me, or a terrible misunderstanding that was stoked up between them.”
He said he knew he was not safe after the arrest in May last year of US army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning (23) who lived in Wales as a teenager, on suspicion of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks.
“I recognised, even then, that forces would always be after me, and they would trap me in some way or another before long,” he writes.
Mr Assange does not confirm that Manning provided his organisation’s biggest revelations, saying WikiLeaks’s “deniability structures” made it impossible for him to know whether he was the source.
But he says the young American soldier would be “a hero of democracy and justice who had taken a role in saving lives” if he had supplied such information.
The book includes insights into Mr Assange’s chaotic life as his group became famous around the world for its leaks of highly sensitive records.
The Australian - who admits he is “some kind of weirdo” with a reputation for “workaholism and infrequent bathing” - travelled the world carrying only “a bag of socks and underwear, and a bigger bag of laptops and cables”, and once had his hair cut as he worked at his computer.
His passionate belief in his cause shines through in the book, in which he describes WikiLeaks as the “first intelligence agency of the people”.
Mr Assange accused Canongate of acting “in breach of contract, in breach of confidence, in breach of my creative rights and in breach of personal assurances” by publishing the memoir.
“This book was meant to be about my life’s struggle for justice through access to knowledge. It has turned into something else,” he said.
“The events surrounding its unauthorised publication by Canongate are not about freedom of information, they are about old-fashioned opportunism and duplicity - screwing people over to make a buck.”
He claimed he sought to draw up a fresh contract with a new deadline so the book could be revised extensively.
Canongate issued a statement in which it accused Mr Assange of offering a “distorted version of events”, adding: “We believe in the book and maintain we were right to publish it.”
Bookshops only learned about the memoir’s publication yesterday, and copies were delivered under strict instructions that the boxes could not be opened until this morning.
Jon Howells, spokesman for booksellers Waterstone's, said: "We have had books delivered under a level of security before, but not to this height. In publishing terms this is real Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy stuff.
“I’ve never heard of somebody writing an autobiography and then asking for it not to be published, but for it to be published anyway. I think it’s unprecedented," he said. It’s very exciting - and somehow fitting.”
Mr Howells predicted that the book would be a “really big seller” because people wanted to read Assange’s own account of the controversies involving him and WikiLeaks.
PA