If, as Christopher Hitchens notes in a recent Slate column, Julian Assange “is plainly a micro-megalomaniac with few if any scruples and an undisguised agenda,” then there’s not much to admire in Assange as a hero. He’s just a hacker that got lucky. (Though maybe not so lucky now.) Even so, we’ll all still go through the cables WikiLeaks published, pump our fists at the stupid things our government does, shrug at the hardly-worth-classifying, wring our hands countless times over what it all means, deplore Assange for the unknown number of lives (if any) he’s put in danger, etc, etc.

To interpret its righteous anger, the Wall Street Journal asked three spy novelists to come up with stories inspired by Assange for a series titled “WikiLeaks Spy Fiction.”  The stories are all intensely critical of Assange, portraying him as a reckless, naive zealot with little interest in the greater good and caring for little more than himself. Not terribly complicated as stories go and with little appetite for moral ambiguity. Still, for a quick assignment, they’re pretty entertaining little espionage vignettes. The writers include Alex Berensen, Joseph Finder, and Alex Carr. Here’s a sampling of my favorite lines:

From No Tee Time for Zubaid by Alex Berensen:

Then Julian Assange came along. He had the pale white skin of a software engineer, the shining fanatic eyes of a suicide bomber, and absolute certainty in his own righteousness. He invented WikiLeaks. And everything went south.

From Waiting for the Train to Minsk by Joseph Finder:

The Swede was waiting for me in a small, bare room, seated in a chair by a window. He was short and pigeon-chested, long blond hair curling under his ears. He had the pale blotchy skin of someone who spends all his time at a computer monitor.

“Please, Mr. Heller,” he said, pointing to the only other chair in the room.

I took a seat. “Are all you guys so paranoid?” I asked.

“If paranoid is the opposite of gullible.” A slow, reptilian blink.

“You know the old story about the two rival businessmen who meet at a Warsaw train station?”

He shook his head warily.

“The first man says, ‘Where are you going?’ and the second one says, ‘To Minsk.’ And then the first one says, ‘You’re telling me you’re going to Minsk, so I’ll think you’re going to Pinsk. But I happen to know you really are going to Minsk. So why are you lying to me?'”

“Your point?”

“Paranoids have a problem dealing with actual candor.”

From Breaking the News to Farash by Alex Carr:

At least she hadn’t used his real name in the reports, Kat told herself as she scanned the news story on her laptop monitor one last time. The language in the leaked cables was generic—a soldier’s shorthand, muscular and compact, honed by decades of drudgery into a perfect bureaucratic tool—but the words were her own, the contents painfully familiar. Somehow she’d known better than to identify the boy, even then. But in truth, she understood, her omission meant little. There was no shortage of clues in the compromised reports. Anyone looking would recognize Farash easily in the hundreds of details he’d given her. His eye for details, after all, was what had made him so valuable in the first place.

Not bad. But perhaps for the next round the Journal can get a take from someone like John le Carré?