CIA ‘plot to capture or kill Assange in London’
Bombshell report claims US planned to grab hacker from hideout in Ecuador embassy
THE CIA plotted an extraordinary mission to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange at his London hideout, former intelligence officials have claimed.
Senior figures in the US spy agency reportedly requested ‘options’ on how to kill the WikiLeaks founder, whose publication of thousands of sensitive leaked documents had left them ‘seeing blood’.
When Washington caught wind of a Russian plot to spirit Assange from his bolthole in the Ecuadorian embassy to Moscow, plans are said to have intensified.
Proposals to thwart the Russian plans included a possible shootout on the streets of London, crashing a car into a vehicle carrying him or shooting out the tyres of a plane before it could take off.
The allegations were reported by Yahoo! News, which said it spoke to 30 former US officials about Assange, eight of whom described the kidnap plot.
Another plan would have seen them ‘break into the embassy, drag [Assange] out and bring him to where we want’, one official told the news website.
‘We had all sorts of reasons to believe he was contemplating getting the hell out of there,’ the official added. ‘It was going to be like a prison-break movie.’
But British security services vetoed the idea, a source told Yahoo! – telling the Americans: ‘No way, you’re not doing that on our territory, that ain’t happening.’
And trying to grab the Australian hacker from an embassy in the capital of a key ally struck some within the CIA as ‘ridiculous’. One said: ‘This isn’t Pakistan or Egypt – we’re talking about London.’ The
‘Going to be like a prison-break movie’
US retaliation was planned after Assange’s WikiLeaks released a trove of military and diplomatic papers in April 2017, considered the ‘largest data loss in CIA history’.
Mike Pompeo, who was director of the agency at the time, and other senior officials ‘were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed’, sources said.
Furious at the leak, Mr Pompeo, who later became Donald Trump’s secretary of state, asked a small group of senior CIA officers to figure out ‘the art of the possible’, it was alleged.
One insider said: ‘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.”’
It was alleged that discussions were held at the ‘highest levels’ of the Trump White House to potentially take out Assange, 50. However, the President’s team had concerns about the legality of such a killing.
Such a plan ‘didn’t get serious traction’, one former CIA official said. ‘It was, this is a crazy thing that wastes our time.’
‘It was viewed as unhinged and ridiculous,’ another added.
Mr Pompeo designated WikiLeaks as a ‘non-state hostile intelligence service’, which saw the CIA treat the organisation like a foreign enemy. It forced the US Justice Department to rush in a draft of charges against him.
Barry Pollock, Assange’s US lawyer, said: ‘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.’
Before the 2017 release of the leaked CIA documents, WikiLeaks had already published thousands of files which embarrassed the US government, including classified reports in 2011 on detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.
Assange fled to the Ecuadorian embassy after he was accused of sexual assault against two Swedish women in June 2012.
He applied to Ecuador for political asylum, claiming the allegations were a pretext to extradite him from Sweden to the US. It was granted in August that year, prompting Assange to give his first of many speeches from the balcony in Knightsbridge to hundreds of supporters gathered outside.
The hacker had an office converted into a studio apartment with a bed, phone, sun lamp, shower and treadmill. He attracted a stream of high-profile visitors including Baywatch star Pamela Anderson, who at one stage he was rumoured to be dating.
But tensions grew when Lenin Moreno became Ecuador’s president in 2017 and ordered Assange to halt his political commentary, stop riding his skateboard in the halls and clean up after his cat.
The new regime finally ended his asylum in April 2019 and British police arrested him. He is currently in Belmarsh prison, south-east London, while he fights extradition to the US on espionage charges.
Mr Trump yesterday denied he ever considered having Assange killed. He added: ‘It’s totally false, it never happened. In fact, I think he’s been treated very badly.’
Neither the CIA nor Mr Pompeo commented on the report.