https://news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-london-shoot-out-inside-the-ci-as-secret-war-plans-against-wiki-leaks-090057786.html

Yahoo News
Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's
secret war plans against WikiLeaks
Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff
Sun, September 26, 2021, 11:00 AM

In 2017, as Julian Assange began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador’s
embassy in London, the CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder,
spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the
legality and practicality of such an operation.

Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even
discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or
“options” for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or
killing Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump
administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official.
“There seemed to be no boundaries.”

The conversations were part of an unprecedented CIA campaign directed
against WikiLeaks and its founder. The agency’s multipronged plans
also included extensive spying on WikiLeaks associates, sowing discord
among the group’s members, and stealing their electronic devices.

While Assange had been on the radar of U.S. intelligence agencies for
years, these plans for an all-out war against him were sparked by
WikiLeaks’ ongoing publication of extraordinarily sensitive CIA
hacking tools, known collectively as “Vault 7,” which the agency
ultimately concluded represented “the largest data loss in CIA
history.”

President Trump’s newly installed CIA director, Mike Pompeo, was
seeking revenge on WikiLeaks and Assange, who had sought refuge in the
Ecuadorian Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape
allegations he denied. Pompeo and other top agency leaders “were
completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed
about Vault 7,” said a former Trump national security official. “They
were seeing blood.”

Michael Pompeo, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
listens during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in Washington,
D.C., U.S., on Thursday, May 11, 2017. ( Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via
Getty Images)
Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo in 2017. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via
Getty Images)
The CIA’s fury at WikiLeaks led Pompeo to publicly describe the group
in 2017 as a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” More than just
a provocative talking point, the designation opened the door for
agency operatives to take far more aggressive actions, treating the
organization as it does adversary spy services, former intelligence
officials told Yahoo News. Within months, U.S. spies were monitoring
the communications and movements of numerous WikiLeaks personnel,
including audio and visual surveillance of Assange himself, according
to former officials.

This Yahoo News investigation, based on conversations with more than
30 former U.S. officials — eight of whom described details of the
CIA’s proposals to abduct Assange — reveals for the first time one of
the most contentious intelligence debates of the Trump presidency and
exposes new details about the U.S. government’s war on WikiLeaks. It
was a campaign spearheaded by Pompeo that bent important legal
strictures, potentially jeopardized the Justice Department’s work
toward prosecuting Assange, and risked a damaging episode in the
United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally.

The CIA declined to comment. Pompeo did not respond to requests for comment.

“As an American citizen, I find it absolutely outrageous that our
government would be contemplating kidnapping or assassinating somebody
without any judicial process simply because he had published truthful
information,” Barry Pollack, Assange’s U.S. lawyer, told Yahoo News.

Assange is now housed in a London prison as the courts there decide on
a U.S. request to extradite the WikiLeaks founder on charges of
attempting to help former U.S. Army analyst Chelsea Manning break into
a classified computer network and conspiring to obtain and publish
classified documents in violation of the Espionage Act.


“My hope and expectation is that the U.K. courts will consider this
information and it will further bolster its decision not to extradite
to the U.S.,” Pollack added.

There is no indication that the most extreme measures targeting
Assange were ever approved, in part because of objections from White
House lawyers, but the agency’s WikiLeaks proposals so worried some
administration officials that they quietly reached out to staffers and
members of Congress on the House and Senate intelligence committees to
alert them to what Pompeo was suggesting. “There were serious intel
oversight concerns that were being raised through this escapade,” said
a Trump national security official.

Some National Security Council officials worried that the CIA’s
proposals to kidnap Assange would not only be illegal but also might
jeopardize the prosecution of the WikiLeaks founder. Concerned the
CIA’s plans would derail a potential criminal case, the Justice
Department expedited the drafting of charges against Assange to ensure
that they were in place if he were brought to the United States.

In late 2017, in the midst of the debate over kidnapping and other
extreme measures, the agency’s plans were upended when U.S. officials
picked up what they viewed as alarming reports that Russian
intelligence operatives were preparing to sneak Assange out of the
United Kingdom and spirit him away to Moscow.

The intelligence reporting about a possible breakout was viewed as
credible at the highest levels of the U.S. government. At the time,
Ecuadorian officials had begun efforts to grant Assange diplomatic
status as part of a scheme to give him cover to leave the embassy and
fly to Moscow to serve in the country’s Russian mission.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange appears at the window before speaking
on the balcony of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London on Feb. 5, 2016.
(Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP)
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appears at the window of the
Ecuadorean Embassy in London on Feb. 5, 2016. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP)
In response, the CIA and the White House began preparing for a number
of scenarios to foil Assange’s Russian departure plans, according to
three former officials. Those included potential gun battles with
Kremlin operatives on the streets of London, crashing a car into a
Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange and then grabbing him,
and shooting out the tires of a Russian plane carrying Assange before
it could take off for Moscow. (U.S. officials asked their British
counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the
British agreed, according to a former senior administration official.)

“We had all sorts of reasons to believe he was contemplating getting
the hell out of there,” said the former senior administration
official, adding that one report said Assange might try to escape the
embassy hidden in a laundry cart. “It was going to be like a prison
break movie.”

The intrigue over a potential Assange escape set off a wild scramble
among rival spy services in London. American, British and Russian
agencies, among others, stationed undercover operatives around the
Ecuadorian Embassy. In the Russians’ case, it was to facilitate a
breakout. For the U.S. and allied services, it was to block such an
escape. “It was beyond comical,” said the former senior official. “It
got to the point where every human being in a three-block radius was
working for one of the intelligence services — whether they were
street sweepers or police officers or security guards.”


White House officials briefed Trump and warned him that the matter
could provoke an international incident — or worse. “We told him, this
is going to get ugly,” said the former official.

As the debate over WikiLeaks intensified, some in the White House
worried that the campaign against the organization would end up
“weakening America,” as one Trump national security official put it,
by lowering barriers that prevent the government from targeting
mainstream journalists and news organizations, said former officials.

The fear at the National Security Council, the former official said,
could be summed up as, “Where does this stop?”


When WikiLeaks launched its website in December 2006, it was a nearly
unprecedented model: Anyone anywhere could submit materials
anonymously for publication. And they did, on topics ranging from
secret fraternity rites to details of the U.S. government’s Guantánamo
Bay detainee operations.

Yet Assange, the lanky Australian activist who led the organization,
didn’t get much attention until 2010, when WikiLeaks released gun
camera footage of a 2007 airstrike by U.S. Army helicopters in Baghdad
that killed at least a dozen people, including two Reuters
journalists, and wounded two young children. The Pentagon had refused
to release the dramatic video, but someone had provided it to
WikiLeaks.

Wikileaks releases leaked 2007 footage of a U.S. Apache helicopter
fatally shooting a group of men at public square in Eastern Baghdad.
(U.S. Military via Wikileaks.org)
WikiLeaks releases leaked 2007 footage of a U.S. Apache helicopter
fatally shooting a group of men at a public square in eastern Baghdad.
(U.S. Military via Wikileaks.org)
Later that year, WikiLeaks also published several caches of classified
and sensitive U.S. government documents related to the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic
cables. Assange was hailed in some circles as a hero and in others as
a villain. For U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the
question was how to deal with the group, which operated differently
than typical news outlets. “The problem posed by WikiLeaks was, there
wasn’t anything like it,” said a former intelligence official.

How to define WikiLeaks has long confounded everyone from government
officials to press advocates. Some view it as an independent
journalistic institution, while others have asserted it is a
handmaiden to foreign spy services.

“They’re not a journalistic organization, they’re nowhere near it,”
William Evanina, who retired as the U.S.’s top counterintelligence
official in early 2021, told Yahoo News in an interview. Evanina
declined to discuss specific U.S. proposals regarding Assange or
WikiLeaks.


But the Obama administration, fearful of the consequences for press
freedom — and chastened by the blowback from its own aggressive leak
hunts — restricted investigations into Assange and WikiLeaks. “We were
stagnated for years,” said Evanina. “There was a reticence in the
Obama administration at a high level to allow agencies to engage in”
certain kinds of intelligence collection against WikiLeaks, including
signals and cyber operations, he said.

That began to change in 2013, when Edward Snowden, a National Security
Agency contractor, fled to Hong Kong with a massive trove of
classified materials, some of which revealed that the U.S. government
was illegally spying on Americans. WikiLeaks helped arrange Snowden’s
escape to Russia from Hong Kong. A WikiLeaks editor also accompanied
Snowden to Russia, staying with him during his 39-day enforced stay at
a Moscow airport and living with him for three months after Russia
granted Snowden asylum.

In the wake of the Snowden revelations, the Obama administration
allowed the intelligence community to prioritize collection on
WikiLeaks, according to Evanina, now the CEO of the Evanina Group.
Previously, if the FBI needed a search warrant to go into the group’s
databases in the United States or wanted to use subpoena power or a
national security letter to gain access to WikiLeaks-related financial
records, “that wasn’t going to happen,” another former senior
counterintelligence official said. “That changed after 2013.”

U.S. whistle-blower Edward Snowden is displayed on a giant screen
during a local news program in Hong Kong, China on June 23, 2013. The
Hong Kong government has confirmed that Edward Snowden has left Hong
Kong and is on a commercial flight to Russia. (Sam Tsang/South China
Morning Post via Getty Images)
An image of Edward Snowden on a giant screen in Hong Kong on June 23,
2013. (Sam Tsang/South China Morning Post via Getty Images)
From that point onward, U.S. intelligence worked closely with friendly
spy agencies to build a picture of WikiLeaks’ network of contacts “and
tie it back to hostile state intelligence services,” Evanina said. The
CIA assembled a group of analysts known unofficially as “the WikiLeaks
team” in its Office of Transnational Issues, with a mission to examine
the organization, according to a former agency official.

Still chafing at the limits in place, top intelligence officials
lobbied the White House to redefine WikiLeaks — and some high-profile
journalists — as “information brokers,” which would have opened up the
use of more investigative tools against them, potentially paving the
way for their prosecution, according to former officials. It “was a
step in the direction of showing a court, if we got that far, that we
were dealing with agents of a foreign power,” a former senior
counterintelligence official said.

Among the journalists some U.S. officials wanted to designate as
“information brokers” were Glenn Greenwald, then a columnist for the
Guardian, and Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker, who had both
been instrumental in publishing documents provided by Snowden.

“Is WikiLeaks a journalistic outlet? Are Laura Poitras and Glenn
Greenwald truly journalists?” the former official said. “We tried to
change the definition of them, and I preached this to the White House,
and got rejected.”


The Obama administration’s policy was, “If there’s published works out
there, doesn’t matter the venue, then we have to treat them as
First-Amendment-protected individuals,” the former senior
counterintelligence official said. “There were some exceptions to that
rule, but they were very, very, very few and far between.” WikiLeaks,
the administration decided, did not fit that exception.

In a statement to Yahoo News, Poitras said reported attempts to
classify herself, Greenwald and Assange as “information brokers”
rather than journalists are “bone-chilling and a threat to journalists
worldwide.”

“That the CIA also conspired to seek the rendition and extrajudicial
assassination of Julian Assange is a state-sponsored crime against the
press,” she added.

“I am not the least bit surprised that the CIA, a longtime
authoritarian and antidemocratic institution, plotted to find a way to
criminalize journalism and spy on and commit other acts of aggression
against journalists,” Greenwald told Yahoo News.

By 2015, WikiLeaks was the subject of an intense debate over whether
the organization should be targeted by law enforcement or spy
agencies. Some argued that the FBI should have sole responsibility for
investigating WikiLeaks, with no role for the CIA or the NSA. The
Justice Department, in particular, was “very protective” of its
authorities over whether to charge Assange and whether to treat
WikiLeaks “like a media outlet,” said Robert Litt, the intelligence
community’s senior lawyer during the Obama administration.

Glenn Greenwald (L) speaks to the media next to Laura Poitras during a
news conference after receiving the George Polk Awards in New York,
April 11, 2014. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)
Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras at a news conference in 2014.
(Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)
Then, in the summer of 2016, at the height of the presidential
election season, came a seismic episode in the U.S. government’s
evolving approach to WikiLeaks, when the website began publishing
Democratic Party emails. The U.S. intelligence community later
concluded the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU
had hacked the emails.

In response to the leak, the NSA began surveilling the Twitter
accounts of the suspected Russian intelligence operatives who were
disseminating the leaked Democratic Party emails, according to a
former CIA official. This collection revealed direct messages between
the operatives, who went by the moniker Guccifer 2.0, and WikiLeaks’
Twitter account. Assange at the time steadfastly denied that the
Russian government was the source for the emails, which were also
published by mainstream news organizations.

Even so, Assange’s communication with the suspected operatives settled
the matter for some U.S. officials. The events of 2016 “really
crystallized” U.S. intelligence officials’ belief that the WikiLeaks
founder “was acting in collusion with people who were using him to
hurt the interests of the United States,” said Litt.

After the publication of the Democratic Party emails, there was “zero
debate” on the issue of whether the CIA would increase its spying on
WikiLeaks, said a former intelligence official. But there was still
“sensitivity on how we would collect on them,” the former official
added.


The CIA now considered people affiliated with WikiLeaks valid targets
for various types of spying, including close-in technical collection —
such as bugs — sometimes enabled by in-person espionage, and “remote
operations,” meaning, among other things, the hacking of WikiLeaks
members’ devices from afar, according to former intelligence
officials.

The Obama administration’s view of WikiLeaks underwent what Evanina
described as a “sea change” shortly before Donald Trump, helped in
part by WikiLeaks’ release of Democratic campaign emails, won a
surprise victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

As Trump’s national security team took their positions at the Justice
Department and the CIA, officials wondered whether, despite his
campaign trail declaration of “love” for WikiLeaks, Trump’s appointees
would take a more hard-line view of the organization. They were not to
be disappointed.

“There was a fundamental change on how [WikiLeaks was] viewed,” said a
former senior counterintelligence official. When it came to
prosecuting Assange — something the Obama administration had declined
to do — the Trump White House had a different approach, said a former
Justice Department official. “Nobody in that crew was going to be too
broken up about the First Amendment issues.”


On April 13, 2017, wearing a U.S. flag pin on the left lapel of his
dark gray suit, Pompeo strode to the podium at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank,
to deliver to a standing-room-only crowd his first public remarks as
Trump’s CIA director.

Rather than use the platform to give an overview of global challenges
or to lay out any bureaucratic changes he was planning to make at the
agency, Pompeo devoted much of his speech to the threat posed by
WikiLeaks.

“WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a
hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find
jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence,” he said.

“It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state
hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like
Russia,” he continued.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo answers questions at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, Thursday, April 13,
2017. Pompeo denounced WikiLeaks, calling the anti-secrecy group a
Pompeo answers questions at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies in Washington in 2017. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
It had been barely five weeks since WikiLeaks had stunned the CIA when
it announced it had obtained a massive tranche of files — which it
dubbed “Vault 7” — from the CIA’s ultrasecret hacking division.
Despite the CIA’s ramped up collection on WikiLeaks, the announcement
came as a complete surprise to the agency, but as soon as the
organization posted the first materials on its website, the CIA knew
it was facing a catastrophe.

Vault 7 “hurt the agency to its core,” said a former CIA official.
Agency officials “used to laugh about WikiLeaks,” mocking the State
Department and the Pentagon for allowing so much material to escape
their control.

Pompeo, apparently fearful of the president’s wrath, was initially
reluctant to even brief the president on Vault 7, according to a
former senior Trump administration official. “Don’t tell him, he
doesn’t need to know,” Pompeo told one briefer, before being advised
that the information was too critical and the president had to be
informed, said the former official.

Irate senior FBI and NSA officials repeatedly demanded interagency
meetings to determine the scope of the damage caused by Vault 7,
according to another former national security official.

The NSA believed that, although the leak revealed only CIA hacking
operations, it could also give countries like Russia or China clues
about NSA targets and methods, said this former official.


Pompeo’s aggressive tone at CSIS reflected his “brash attitude,” said
a former senior intelligence official. “He would want to push the
limits as much as he could” during his tenure as CIA director, the
former official said.

The Trump administration was sending more signals that it would no
longer be bound by the Obama administration’s self-imposed
restrictions regarding WikiLeaks. For some U.S. intelligence
officials, this was a welcome change. “There was immense hostility to
WikiLeaks in the beginning from the intelligence community,” said
Litt.

Vault 7 prompted “a brand-new mindset with the administration for
rethinking how to look at WikiLeaks as an adversarial actor,” Evanina
said. “That was new, and it was refreshing for the intelligence
community and the law enforcement community.” Updates on Assange were
frequently included in Trump’s President’s Daily Brief, a top-secret
document prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies that summarizes the
day’s most critical national security issues, according to a former
national security official.

The immediate question facing Pompeo and the CIA was how to hit back
against WikiLeaks and Assange. Agency officials found the answer in a
legal sleight of hand. Usually, for U.S. intelligence to secretly
interfere with the activities of any foreign actor, the president must
sign a document called a “finding” that authorizes such covert action,
which must also be briefed to the House and Senate intelligence
committees. In very sensitive cases, notification is limited to
Congress’s so-called Gang of Eight — the four leaders of the House and
Senate, plus the chairperson and ranking member of the two committees.

But there is an important carveout. Many of the same actions, if taken
against another spy service, are considered “offensive
counterintelligence” activities, which the CIA is allowed to conduct
without getting a presidential finding or having to brief Congress,
according to several former intelligence officials.

Often, the CIA makes these decisions internally, based on
interpretations of so-called “common law” passed down in secret within
the agency’s legal corps. “I don’t think people realize how much [the]
CIA can do under offensive [counterintelligence] and how there is
minimal oversight of it,” said a former official.

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, discusses publication of
secret US documents about the war in Afghanistan at a press conference
in the Frontline Club, London on July 26, 2010. (Julian
Simmonds/Shutterstock)
Assange discusses the publication of secret U.S. documents about the
war in Afghanistan at a 2010 press conference in London. (Julian
Simmonds/Shutterstock)
The difficulty in proving that WikiLeaks was operating at the direct
behest of the Kremlin was a major factor behind the CIA’s move to
designate the group as a hostile intelligence service, according to a
former senior counterintelligence official. “There was a lot of legal
debate on: Are they operating as a Russian agent?” said the former
official. “It wasn’t clear they were, so the question was, can it be
reframed on them being a hostile entity.”

Intelligence community lawyers decided that it could. When Pompeo
declared WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service,” he was
neither speaking off the cuff nor repeating a phrase concocted by a
CIA speechwriter. “That phrase was chosen advisedly and reflected the
view of the administration,” a former Trump administration official
said.

But Pompeo’s declaration surprised Litt, who had left his position as
general counsel of the Office of the Director for National
Intelligence less than three months previously. “Based on the
information that I had seen, I thought he was out over his skis on
that,” Litt said.

For many senior intelligence officials, however, Pompeo’s designation
of WikiLeaks was a positive step. “We all agreed that WikiLeaks was a
hostile intelligence organization and should be dealt with
accordingly,” said a former senior CIA official.


Soon after the speech, Pompeo asked a small group of senior CIA
officers to figure out “the art of the possible” when it came to
WikiLeaks, said another former senior CIA official. “He said,
‘Nothing’s off limits, don’t self-censor yourself. I need operational
ideas from you. I’ll worry about the lawyers in Washington.’” CIA
headquarters in Langley, Va., sent messages directing CIA stations and
bases worldwide to prioritize collection on WikiLeaks, according to
the former senior agency official.

The CIA’s designation of WikiLeaks as a non-state hostile intelligence
service enabled “the doubling down of efforts globally and
domestically on collection” against the group, Evanina said. Those
efforts included tracking the movements and communications of Assange
and other top WikiLeaks figures by “tasking more on the tech side,
recruiting more on the human side,” said another former senior
counterintelligence official.

This was no easy task. WikiLeaks associates were “super-paranoid
people,” and the CIA estimated that only a handful of individuals had
access to the Vault 7 materials the agency wanted to retrieve, said a
former intelligence official. Those individuals employed security
measures that made obtaining the information difficult, including
keeping it on encrypted drives that they either carried on their
persons or locked in safes, according to former officials.

WikiLeaks claimed it had published only a fraction of the Vault 7
documents in its possession. So, what if U.S. intelligence found a
tranche of those unpublished materials online? At the White House,
officials began planning for that scenario. Could the United States
launch a cyberattack on a server being used by WikiLeaks to house
these documents?

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange presents Iraq war logs at press
conference, Westminster, London on October 23, 2010. (Shutterstock)
Assange presents U.S. military documents on the Iraq War at press
conference in London on Oct. 23, 2010. (Shutterstock)
Officials weren’t sure if the Defense Department had the authority to
do so at the time, absent the president’s signature. Alternatively,
they suggested, perhaps the CIA could carry out the same action under
the agency’s offensive counterintelligence powers. After all,
officials reasoned, the CIA would be erasing its own documents.
However, U.S. spies never located a copy of the unpublished Vault 7
materials online, so the discussion was ultimately moot, according to
a former national security official.

Nonetheless, the CIA had some successes. By mid-2017, U.S. spies had
excellent intelligence on numerous WikiLeaks members and associates,
not just on Assange, said former officials. This included what these
individuals were saying and who they were saying it to, where they
were traveling or going to be at a given date and time, and what
platforms these individuals were communicating on, according to former
officials.

U.S. spy agencies developed good intelligence on WikiLeaks associates’
“patterns of life,” particularly their travels within Europe, said a
former national security official. U.S. intelligence was particularly
keen on information documenting travel by WikiLeaks associates to
Russia or countries in Russia’s orbit, according to the former
official.

At the CIA, the new designation meant Assange and WikiLeaks would go
from “a target of collection to a target of disruption,” said a former
senior CIA official. Proposals began percolating upward within the CIA
and the NSC to undertake various disruptive activities — the core of
“offensive counterintelligence” — against WikiLeaks. These included
paralyzing its digital infrastructure, disrupting its communications,
provoking internal disputes within the organization by planting
damaging information, and stealing WikiLeaks members’ electronic
devices, according to three former officials.


Infiltrating the group, either with a real person or by inventing a
cyber persona to gain the group’s confidence, was quickly dismissed as
unlikely to succeed because the senior WikiLeaks figures were so
security-conscious, according to former intelligence officials. Sowing
discord within the group seemed an easier route to success, in part
because “those guys hated each other and fought all the time,” a
former intelligence official said.

But many of the other ideas were “not ready for prime time,” said the
former intelligence official.

“Some dude affiliated with WikiLeaks was moving around the world, and
they wanted to go steal his computer because they thought he might
have” Vault 7 files, said the former official.

The official was unable to identify that individual. But some of these
proposals may have been eventually approved. In December 2020, a
German hacker closely affiliated with WikiLeaks who assisted with the
Vault 7 publications claimed that there had been an attempt to break
into his apartment, which he had secured with an elaborate locking
system. The hacker, Andy Müller-Maguhn, also said he had been tailed
by mysterious figures and that his encrypted telephone had been
bugged.

Andy Müller-Maguhn speaks at the Cyber Security Summit 2014 in
Bonn Germany. (Ollendorf/Itterman (Telekom))
Andy Müller-Maguhn speaks at the Cyber Security Summit in Bonn,
Germany, in 2014. (Ollendorf/Itterman (Telekom))
Asked whether the CIA had broken into WikiLeaks’ associates’ homes and
stolen or wiped their hard drives, a former intelligence official
declined to go into detail but said that “some actions were taken.”


By the summer of 2017, the CIA’s proposals were setting off alarm
bells at the National Security Council. “WikiLeaks was a complete
obsession of Pompeo’s,” said a former Trump administration national
security official. “After Vault 7, Pompeo and [Deputy CIA Director
Gina] Haspel wanted vengeance on Assange.”

At meetings between senior Trump administration officials after
WikiLeaks started publishing the Vault 7 materials, Pompeo began
discussing kidnapping Assange, according to four former officials.
While the notion of kidnapping Assange preceded Pompeo’s arrival at
Langley, the new director championed the proposals, according to
former officials.

Pompeo and others at the agency proposed abducting Assange from the
embassy and surreptitiously bringing him back to the United States via
a third country — a process known as rendition. The idea was to “break
into the embassy, drag [Assange] out and bring him to where we want,”
said a former intelligence official. A less extreme version of the
proposal involved U.S. operatives snatching Assange from the embassy
and turning him over to British authorities.

Such actions were sure to create a diplomatic and political firestorm,
as they would have involved violating the sanctity of the Ecuadorian
Embassy before kidnapping the citizen of a critical U.S. partner —
Australia — in the capital of the United Kingdom, the United States’
closest ally. Trying to seize Assange from an embassy in the British
capital struck some as “ridiculous,” said the former intelligence
official. “This isn’t Pakistan or Egypt — we’re talking about London.”

British acquiescence was far from assured. Former officials differ on
how much the U.K. government knew about the CIA’s rendition plans for
Assange, but at some point, American officials did raise the issue
with their British counterparts.

A general view of the Ecuadorian embassy in London where Wikileaks
founder Julian Assange is residing, London on January 18, 2017. (Will
Oliver/EPA/Shutterstock)
The Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange resided for seven years. (Will Oliver/EPA/Shutterstock)
“There was a discussion with the Brits about turning the other cheek
or looking the other way when a team of guys went inside and did a
rendition,” said a former senior counterintelligence official. “But
the British said, ‘No way, you’re not doing that on our territory,
that ain’t happening.’” The British Embassy in Washington did not
return a request for comment.

In addition to diplomatic concerns about rendition, some NSC officials
believed that abducting Assange would be clearly illegal. “You can’t
throw people in a car and kidnap them,” said a former national
security official.

In fact, said this former official, for some NSC personnel, “This was
the key question: Was it possible to render Assange under [the CIA’s]
offensive counterintelligence” authorities? In this former official’s
thinking, those powers were meant to enable traditional spy-versus-spy
activities, “not the same kind of crap we pulled in the war on
terror.”

Some discussions even went beyond kidnapping. U.S. officials had also
considered killing Assange, according to three former officials. One
of those officials said he was briefed on a spring 2017 meeting in
which the president asked whether the CIA could assassinate Assange
and provide him “options” for how to do so.


“It was viewed as unhinged and ridiculous,” recalled this former
senior CIA official of the suggestion.

It’s unclear how serious the proposals to kill Assange really were. “I
was told they were just spitballing,” said a former senior
counterintelligence official briefed on the discussions about “kinetic
options” regarding the WikiLeaks founder. “It was just Trump being
Trump."

Nonetheless, at roughly the same time, agency executives requested and
received “sketches” of plans for killing Assange and other
Europe-based WikiLeaks members who had access to Vault 7 materials,
said a former intelligence official. There were discussions “on
whether killing Assange was possible and whether it was legal,” the
former official said.

Yahoo News could not confirm if these proposals made it to the White
House. Some officials with knowledge of the rendition proposals said
they had heard no discussions about assassinating Assange.

In a statement to Yahoo News, Trump denied that he ever considered
having Assange assassinated. “It’s totally false, it never happened,”
he said. Trump seemed to express some sympathy for Assange’s plight.
“In fact, I think he’s been treated very badly,” he added.

Whatever Trump’s view of the matter at the time, his NSC lawyers were
bulwarks against the CIA’s potentially illegal proposals, according to
former officials. “While people think the Trump administration didn’t
believe in the rule of law, they had good lawyers who were paying
attention to it,” said a former senior intelligence official.

President Donald Trump speaks at CIA Headquarters in Langley,
Virginia, on January 21, 2017. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
Then-President Donald Trump at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., in
2017. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
The rendition talk deeply alarmed some senior administration
officials. John Eisenberg, the top NSC lawyer, and Michael Ellis, his
deputy, worried that “Pompeo is advocating things that are not likely
to be legal,” including “rendition-type activity,” said a former
national security official. Eisenberg wrote to CIA General Counsel
Courtney Simmons Elwood expressing his concerns about the agency’s
WikiLeaks-related proposals, according to another Trump national
security official.

It’s unclear how much Elwood knew about the proposals. “When Pompeo
took over, he cut the lawyers out of a lot of things,” said a former
senior intelligence community attorney.

Pompeo’s ready access to the Oval Office, where he would meet with
Trump alone, exacerbated the lawyers’ fears. Eisenberg fretted that
the CIA director was leaving those meetings with authorities or
approvals signed by the president that Eisenberg knew nothing about,
according to former officials.

NSC officials also worried about the timing of the potential Assange
kidnapping. Discussions about rendering Assange occurred before the
Justice Department filed any criminal charges against him, even under
seal — meaning that the CIA could have kidnapped Assange from the
embassy without any legal basis to try him in the United States.

Eisenberg urged Justice Department officials to accelerate their
drafting of charges against Assange, in case the CIA’s rendition plans
moved forward, according to former officials. The White House told
Attorney General Jeff Sessions that if prosecutors had grounds to
indict Assange they should hurry up and do so, according to a former
senior administration official.

Things got more complicated in May 2017, when the Swedes dropped their
rape investigation into Assange, who had always denied the
allegations. White House officials developed a backup plan: The
British would hold Assange on a bail jumping charge, giving Justice
Department prosecutors a 48-hour delay to rush through an indictment.

Eisenberg was concerned about the legal implications of rendering
Assange without criminal charges in place, according to a former
national security official. Absent an indictment, where would the
agency bring him, said another former official who attended NSC
meetings on the topic. “Were we going to go back to ‘black sites’?”


As U.S. officials debated the legality of kidnapping Assange, they
came to believe that they were racing against the clock. Intelligence
reports warned that Russia had its own plans to sneak the WikiLeaks
leader out of the embassy and fly him to Moscow, according to Evanina,
the top U.S. counterintelligence official from 2014 through early
2021.

The United States “had exquisite collection of his plans and
intentions,” said Evanina. “We were very confident that we were able
to mitigate any of those [escape] attempts.”

Officials became particularly concerned when suspected Russian
operatives in diplomatic vehicles near the Ecuadorian Embassy were
observed practicing a “starburst” maneuver, a common tactic for spy
services, whereby multiple operatives suddenly scatter to escape
surveillance, according to former officials. This may have been a
practice run for an exfiltration, potentially coordinated with the
Ecuadorians, to get Assange out of the embassy and whisk him out of
the country, U.S. officials believed.

Julian Assange greets supporters outside the Ecuadorian embassy in
London on May 19, 2017. (Frank Augstein/AP)
Assange greets supporters outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on
May 19, 2017. (Frank Augstein/AP)
“The Ecuadorians would tip off the Russians that they were going to be
releasing Assange on the street, and then the Russians would pick him
up and spirit him back to Russia,” said a former national security
official.

Officials developed multiple tactical plans to thwart any Kremlin
attempt to spring Assange, some of which envisioned clashes with
Russian operatives in the British capital. “There could be anything
from a fistfight to a gunfight to cars running into each other,” said
a former senior Trump administration official.

U.S. officials disagreed over how to interdict Assange if he attempted
to escape. A proposal to initiate a car crash to halt Assange’s
vehicle was not only a “borderline” or “extralegal” course of action —
“something we’d do in Afghanistan, but not in the U.K.” — but was also
particularly sensitive since Assange was likely going to be
transported in a Russian diplomatic vehicle, said a former national
security official.

If the Russians managed to get Assange onto a plane, U.S. or British
operatives would prevent it from taking off by blocking it with a car
on the runway, hovering a helicopter over it or shooting out its
tires, according to a former senior Trump administration official. In
the unlikely event that the Russians succeeded in getting airborne,
officials planned to ask European countries to deny the plane
overflight rights, the former official said.

Eventually, the United States and the U.K. developed a “joint plan” to
prevent Assange from absconding and giving Vladimir Putin the sort of
propaganda coup he had enjoyed when Snowden fled to Russia in 2013,
Evanina said.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin speaks during his press
conference at the Kremlin in Moscow, on July 1, 2013. Putin said
today that his country had never extradited anyone before and added
that US leaker Edward Snowden could remain in Moscow if he stopped
issuing his leaks. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images)
Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a press conference in Moscow
on July 1, 2013, that his country had never extradited anyone before.
(Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images)
“It’s not just him getting to Moscow and taking secrets,” he said.
“The second wind that Putin would get — he gets Snowden and now he
gets Assange — it becomes a geopolitical win for him and his
intelligence services.”

Evanina declined to comment on the plans to prevent Assange from
escaping to Russia, but he suggested that the “Five Eyes” intelligence
alliance between the United States, the U.K., Canada, Australia and
New Zealand was critical. “We were very confident within the Five Eyes
that we would be able to prevent him from going there,” he said.

But testimony in a Spanish criminal investigation strongly suggests
that U.S. intelligence may also have had inside help keeping tabs on
Assange’s plans.

By late 2015, Ecuador had hired a Spanish security company called UC
Global to protect the country’s London embassy, where Assange had
already spent several years running WikiLeaks from his living
quarters. Unbeknownst to Ecuador, however, by mid-2017 UC Global was
also working for U.S. intelligence, according to two former employees
who testified in a Spanish criminal investigation first reported by
the newspaper El País.

The Spanish firm was providing U.S. intelligence agencies with
detailed reports of Assange’s activities and visitors as well as video
and audio surveillance of Assange from secretly installed devices in
the embassy, the employees testified. A former U.S. national security
official confirmed that U.S. intelligence had access to video and
audio feeds of Assange within the embassy but declined to specify how
it acquired them.

By December 2017, the plan to get Assange to Russia appeared to be
ready. UC Global had learned that Assange would “receive a diplomatic
passport from Ecuadorian authorities, with the aim of leaving the
embassy to transit to a third state,” a former employee said. On Dec.
15, Ecuador made Assange an official diplomat of that country and
planned to assign him to its embassy in Moscow, according to documents
obtained by the Associated Press.

Watched by the media WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange looks out from
the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy prior to speaking, in London on
May 19, 2017. (Matt Dunham/AP)
Assange prepares to make a statement at the Ecuadorian Embassy in
London on May 19, 2017. (Matt Dunham/AP)
Assange said he “was not aware” of the plan struck by the Ecuadorian
foreign minister to assign him to Moscow, and refused to “accept that
assignment,” said Fidel Narvaez, who was the first secretary at the
Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2017 and 2018.

Narvaez told Yahoo News that he was directed by his superiors to try
and get Assange accredited as a diplomat to the London embassy.
“However, Ecuador did have a plan B,” said Narvaez, “and I understood
it was to be Russia.”

Aitor Martínez, a Spanish lawyer for Assange who worked closely with
Ecuador on getting Assange his diplomat status, also said the
Ecuadorian foreign minister presented the Russia assignment to Assange
as a fait accompli — and that Assange, when he heard about it,
immediately rejected the idea.

On Dec. 21, the Justice Department secretly charged Assange,
increasing the chances of legal extradition to the United States. That
same day, UC Global recorded a meeting held between Assange and the
head of Ecuador’s intelligence service to discuss Assange’s escape
plan, according to El País. “Hours after the meeting” the U.S.
ambassador relayed his knowledge of the plan to his Ecuadorian
counterparts, reported El País.

Martínez says the plan — organized by the head of Ecuadorian
intelligence — to sneak Assange out of the London embassy and onward,
as a diplomat, to a third country was canceled after they learned the
Americans were aware of it.

But U.S. intelligence officials believed Russia planned to exfiltrate
Assange, reportedly on Christmas Eve. According to the former UC
Global employee, the company’s boss discussed with his American
contacts the possibility of leaving the embassy door open, as if by
accident, “which would allow persons to enter from outside the embassy
and kidnap the asylee.”


In testimony first reported in the Guardian, another idea also took
shape. “Even the possibility of poisoning Mr. Assange was discussed,”
the employee said his boss told him.

Even Assange appeared to fear assassination. Some Vault 7 material,
which CIA officials believed to be even more damaging than the files
WikiLeaks had published, had been distributed among Assange’s
colleagues with instructions to publish it if one of them were killed,
according to U.S. officials.

A primary question for U.S. officials was whether any CIA plan to
kidnap or potentially kill Assange was legal. The discussions occurred
under the aegis of the agency’s new “offensive counterintelligence”
authorities, according to former officials. Some officials thought
this was a highly aggressive, and likely legally transgressive,
interpretation of these powers.

Without a presidential finding — the directive used to justify covert
operations — assassinating Assange or other WikiLeaks members would be
illegal, according to several former intelligence officials. In some
situations, even a finding is not sufficient to make an action legal,
said a former national security official. The CIA’s newfound offensive
counterintelligence powers regarding WikiLeaks would not have
stretched to assassination. “That kind of lethal action would be way
outside of a legitimate intelligence or counterintelligence activity,”
a former senior intelligence community lawyer said.

In the end, the assassination discussions went nowhere, said former officials.

The idea of killing Assange “didn’t get serious traction,” said a
former senior CIA official. “It was, this is a crazy thing that wastes
our time.”


Inside the White House, Pompeo’s impassioned arguments on WikiLeaks
were making little headway. The director’s most aggressive proposals
were “probably taken seriously” in Langley but not within the NSC, a
former national security official said.

Even Sessions, Trump’s “very, very anti-Assange” attorney general, was
opposed to CIA’s encroachment onto Justice Department territory, and
believed that the WikiLeaks founder’s case was best handled through
legal channels, said the former official.

Sessions’ concerns mirrored the tensions between the ramped-up
intelligence collection and disruption efforts aimed at WikiLeaks, and
the Justice Department’s goal of convicting Assange in open court,
according to former officials. The more aggressive the CIA’s proposals
became, the more other U.S. officials worried about what the discovery
process might reveal if Assange were to face trial in the United
States.


“I was part of every one of those conversations,” Evanina said. “As
much as we had the greener light to go do things, everything we did or
wanted to do had repercussions in other parts of the administration.”
As a result, he said, sometimes administration officials would ask the
intelligence community to either not do something or do it
differently, so that “we don’t have to sacrifice our collection that’s
going to be released publicly by the bureau to indict WikiLeaks.”

Eventually, those within the administration arguing for an approach
based in the courts, rather than on espionage and covert action, won
the policy debate. On April 11, 2019, after Ecuador’s new government
revoked his asylum and evicted him, British police carried the
WikiLeaks founder out of the embassy and arrested him for failing to
surrender to the court over a warrant issued in 2012. The U.S.
government unsealed its initial indictment of Assange the same day.

That indictment focused exclusively on allegations that in 2010,
Assange offered to help Manning, the Army intelligence analyst, crack
a password to break into a classified U.S. government network, an act
that would have gone beyond journalism. But in a move that drew howls
from press advocates, prosecutors later tacked on Espionage Act
charges against Assange for publishing classified information —
something that U.S. media outlets do regularly.

Assange’s legal odyssey appears to have only just begun. In January, a
British judge ruled Assange could not be extradited to the United
States, finding that he would be a suicide risk in a U.S. prison.
Although Assange supporters hoped the Biden administration might drop
the case, the United States, undeterred, appealed the decision. In
July, a U.K. court formally permitted the U.S. appeal to proceed.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange arrives at Westminster Magistrates
Court in a police escort to appear where he faces an extradition
warrant in London on April 11, 2019. (Rob Pinney/LNP/Shutterstock)
Assange, facing an extradition warrant in London, is seen arriving at
Westminster Magistrates’ Court on April 11, 2019. (Rob
Pinney/LNP/Shutterstock)
Pollack, Assange’s lawyer, told Yahoo News that if Assange is
extradited to face trial, “the extreme nature of the type of
government misconduct that you’re reporting would certainly be an
issue and potentially grounds for dismissal.” He likened the measures
used to target Assange to those deployed by the Nixon administration
against Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers, noting the
charges against Ellsberg were ultimately dismissed as well.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks may be increasingly obsolete. The growing ability
of groups and individuals — whistleblowers or dissidents, spies or
criminals — to publish leaked materials online diminishes the group’s
raison d’être. “We’re kind of post-WikiLeaks right now,” said a former
senior counterintelligence official.

Yet spy services are increasingly using a WikiLeaks-like model of
posting stolen materials online. In 2018, the Trump administration
granted the CIA aggressive new secret authorities to undertake the
same sort of hack-and-dump operations for which Russian intelligence
has used WikiLeaks. Among other actions, the agency has used its new
powers to covertly release information online about a Russian company
that worked with Moscow’s spy apparatus.

For a former Trump national security official, the lessons of the
CIA’s campaign against WikiLeaks are clear. “There was an
inappropriate level of attention to Assange given the embarrassment,
not the threat he posed in context,” said this official.

“We should never act out of a desire for revenge.”

EOF