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About this time three years ago, when Julian Assange was a long-haired computer hacker who the United States authorities suspected might be in possession of some important files of theirs, his contacts in London noticed that one of their number was becoming especially close to him.

Sarah Harrison was a beautiful twentysomething Londoner who had been a junior researcher for an organisation working with WikiLeaks. As the cool summer of 2010 got under way, it became apparent that she was also Assange’s lover.

That relationship, which has lasted for much of the time since, has been kept under the radar by Assange, as was her role in WikiLeaks. But Harrison finds herself thrust into the eye of a global diplomatic storm — chosen by Assange to accompany celebrity whistleblower Edward Snowden on his escape from US extradition.

A statement from WikiLeaks on Sunday said the previously low-profile Harrison had “courageously assisted Mr Snowden with his lawful departure from Hong Kong and is accompanying him in his passage to safety”. On Monday, in a call to journalists, Assange said: “The current status of Mr Snowden and Harrison is that both are healthy and safe and they are in contact with their legal teams.”

Some now wonder if Harrison is directing the most gripping drama in town. But just who is she? Harrison, it seems, is the girl who has come from nowhere. Like other WikiLeaks staffers she has reduced her online profile to almost zero, and while one source says she hails from Kent little is known about her education or family background, other than that she studied science and literature at university in London. None of the former employers we spoke to claims to have seen her CV, nor could they even confirm her age.

The WikiLeaks website says Harrison has “worked on important investigative projects” and describes her as a “UK citizen, journalist and legal researcher”. Uncharacteristically for WikiLeaks, that has to go down as understatement.

London figures who have worked with and near Harrison say she is Assange’s most powerful lieutenant and his principal link to the outside world from his room in the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge. She doesn’t have desk space — only Assange does — but as a member of the legal team she often has meetings with him. Anyone who wants to deal with Assange must go through his young gatekeeper and she represents him at events that his diplomatic impasse prevents him from attending in person, including a private visit to Australia last month where someone present says she was acting as “eyes and ears on the ground in the lead-up to the Australian election.”

Since she took off from Hong Kong with Snowden, the Standard has spoken to several people who witnessed at first-hand how Harrison caught Assange’s eye with her unpaid work on complex and secret data and became his lover and one of the leading members of WikiLeaks.

Among the speculation and half-truths written about Harrison, it is a matter of record that she was one of the people who offered bail sureties for Assange and was forced to pay £3,500 last year when he escaped extradition to Sweden to face questioning on sex charges by fleeing to the embassy.

Veteran investigative journalist Gavin MacFadyen recalls being impressed when Harrison came to him in 2009 asking for an unpaid internship. He says she proved to be “a very solid, serious researcher” at his educational group, the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ), which is based at City University.

MacFadyen says she was “very single-minded and focused” and “would come in and just work like a maniac all day long”. Outside work, he says, she didn’t go near “frivolity and wild drinking parties” and came across as “a very serious person”.

Things got serious in a different way when MacFadyen’s organisation began to work with the newly famous Julian Assange. On one of his visits to the CIJ, Harrison apparently met him.

For the moment, though, no one clocked the pair’s immediate connection. Harrison’s work for MacFadyen saw her move to another group based at City University called the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), whose then editor-in-chief Iain Overton has confirmed that he hired her as a junior researcher in May 2010. The BIJ had been given Assange’s thousands of leaked files about the war in Iraq to sort through for two documentaries, and they needed good data analysts who could work a bit below the radar.

“I was always trying to work out her age,” says Overton, who recalls that “she dressed young” and “with a kind of liberal tendency — lots of dangly earrings”. He says she kept herself to herself but won’t comment on the relationship she struck up at that time with the man who is more than 10 years her senior.

Sources confirm that the pair became an item in the summer of 2010 — Harrison staying with Assange at his room in Paddington — and continued to go out as Assange’s international profile grew. Harrison stayed with him in December 2010 at Ellingham Hall — the Norfolk mansion owned by WikiLeaks supporter Vaughan Smith.

Even those very close to Assange don’t seem to know what the current status of the relationship is (with some reports suggesting it may presently be off), though one confirms that it continued after 2010 “for a significant period of time”.

Whatever her personal status, it is clear that the power Harrison wields on Assange’s behalf is greater than ever. This time last year she presented a leak called The Syria Files to the press at the Frontline Club with the same blend of charm and messianic rhetoric that used to characterise her boss’s speeches in the same room.

And this week she faces her biggest gig yet — shepherding the most famous leaker in the world to diplomatic safety. MacFadyen sees the logic of Snowden travelling with her, and says she is “quite experienced in the issue of emigration and extradition law” and “has a good sense of diplomatic protocol”.

President Putin yesterday confirmed that Snowden, and presumably also Harrison, are holed up in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, adding ominously that “the sooner he chooses his final destination, the better it is for him and Russia”. Assange will hope his protégée can offer good counsel for another leaker on the run.

Additional reporting by Tim Arbabzadah