WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was a source, not a partner or collaborator, according to the New York Times in a new, detail-rich Times magazine piece about the newspaper's volatile relationship with beleaguered WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the government's behind-the-scenes reactions to the cache of documents the site has published.

The lengthy article, written by Times editor-in-chief Bill Keller, appears aimed at distancing his paper from Assange, who is described as "thin-skinned" and "arrogant," and continues the recent trend of "Assange-bashing" by WikiLeaks media partners.

A Vanity Fair article earlier this month provided a similar glimpse of the rocky relationship between Assange and the Guardian newspaper in London, including news that Assange had threatened to sue the paper if it published documents before he gave the go-ahead. Keller reveals that Assange also hinted at suing the Times over the same issue.

In the article, Keller describes Assange as "elusive, manipulative and volatile (and ultimately openly hostile to The Times and The Guardian)." He adds that, "We regarded Assange throughout as a source, not as a partner or collaborator," and that Assange "was a man who clearly had his own agenda."

Lest this be interpreted as the Times supporting a U.S. prosecution of Assange for publishing classified documents, Keller writes that, "while I do not regard Assange as a partner, and I would hesitate to describe what WikiLeaks does as journalism, it is chilling to contemplate the possible government prosecution of WikiLeaks for making secrets public, let alone the passage of new laws to punish the dissemination of classified information, as some have advocated."

Keller strangely hints, however, that Assange or other WikiLeaks staffers might have been involved in at least one kind of illegal activity. During the height of tension between WikiLeaks and its media partners, the e-mail accounts of at least three newspaper people associated with the project appeared to be hacked. Keller suggests Assange and WikiLeaks could have been behind the intrusions but offers no evidence.

When I left New York for two weeks to visit bureaus in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where we assume that communications may be monitored, I was not to be copied on message traffic about the [WikiLeaks] project. I never imagined that any of this would defeat a curious snoop from the National Security Agency or Pakistani intelligence. And I was never entirely sure whether that prospect made me more nervous than the cyberwiles of WikiLeaks itself. At a point when relations between the news organizations and WikiLeaks were rocky, at least three people associated with this project had inexplicable activity in their e-mail that suggested someone was hacking into their accounts.

The piece opens on a surprising note with a call last June, when Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, rang Keller to discuss joining the Guardian in publishing WikiLeaks documents. That's not the surprise. The surprise comes when Rusbridger asks Keller if he has any idea how to arrange a secure communication.

"Not really," Keller confesses, noting that the Times didn't have encrypted phone lines. Apparently, WikiLeaks hadn't clued the Guardian in on Cryptophones, the preferred secured communication method of its staffers.

Subsequently, Times reporter Eric Schmitt ended up meeting with Assange in London, reporting back to Keller that he looked like "a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn't bathed in days."

Although Assange's appearance and behavior raised a number of red flags, the partnership proceeded. As his public profile grew, however, so did the tension between him and the newspaper staffs. By the time WikiLeaks and its media partners had published the Iraq logs last October, relations had grown hostile. Assange was angry that the Times had not linked its online coverage of the Iraq war logs to the WikiLeaks web site. "Where's the respect?” Keller says Assange demanded. “Where's the respect?”

Keller says the paper had feared that WikiLeaks would release unredacted documents that would expose the names of U.S. informants. WikiLeaks did, in fact, expose some names in the first batch of documents it published on the Afghan war, although to date no one is known to have been harmed as a result of the exposure.

Assange was most angry, however, over an unflattering front-page profile the Times published. He wanted a front-page apology, but by then was in no position to make demands, since the newspapers already possessed the next batch of WikiLeaks documents – some 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables – and no longer needed Assange's cooperation.

In retaliation, Assange ordered the Guardian to withhold the cables from the Times and said he would bring in the Washington Post and McClatchy newspaper chain instead.

But the Guardian gave the Times the documents anyway, having obtained a second copy of them from freelance journalist Heather Brooke. Brooke got them from a WikiLeaks insider who was presumably angry with Assange's behavior. The leak from within WikiLeaks, Keller writes, revealed that "Assange was losing control of his stockpile of secrets."

Just as fascinating is Keller's descriptions of the reactions of U.S. officials to the leaks.

On July 24, the day before the Afghan war logs were to be published, Keller attended a party for a Times columnist given by Richard Holbrooke, U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke pulled Keller aside and showed him the "fusillade of cabinet-level e-mail ricocheting through his BlackBerry." The administration was in a panic over the impending publication. But Holbrooke seemed less angry than "excited to be on the cusp of a big story as I was."

Months later, the Times met with U.S. officials in a windowless State Department room prior to publication of the diplomatic cables. The unsmiling group included representatives from the White House, State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Pentagon, as well as "others, who never identified themselves."

Keller writes that the tone was “suppressed outrage." Another Times staffer says in a video accompanying the Keller article, that it seemed as if officials "couldn’t decide whether they wanted to engage us or arrest us. "

It's clear from the piece that Keller has a low opinion of Assange and thinks the cultural impact of WikiLeaks itself has been "overblown." But he says the documents WikiLeaks released were valuable for providing texture and nuance and deepening the public's understanding of how the military operates and how government diplomatic relations unfold.

"If a project like this makes readers pay attention, think harder, understand more clearly what is being done in their name, then we have performed a public service," he writes.

But he seems to doubt, himself, that this will be the lasting message of the leaks when he notes that "the story of this wholesale security breach had outgrown the story of the actual contents of the secret documents."

Photo: Julian Assange (center) speaks to the media, flanked by his lawyers Mark Stephens and Jennifer Robinson after making a court appearance in London on Jan. 11. Matt Dunham/AP