Ecuador pulled welcome amid Assange antics
WikiLeaks founder’s eviction, capture came off without a hitch, insider says
Huddled at a home in Ecuador’s capital, President Lenin Moreno’s aides anxiously awaited word in the middle of the night on an operation that would soon make headlines around the world: the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange inside the country’s London embassy.
Over the course of nearly seven years, the Australian hacker had all but worn out his welcome at the embassy with antics that included late-night skateboarding, harassing the staff and smearing his feces on the walls, according to Ecuadorian officials.
Moreno had finally decided to kick Assange out after getting wind of a WikiLeaks plot to blackmail him by publishing compromising documents, according to a senior government official who wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity. An incensed Moreno gave British authorities 36 hours to execute the raid Assange’s critics had long been demanding.
Now, the president’s aides looked nervously at their watches. Most of Ecuador, including Moreno himself, was asleep. As Moreno’s 4 a.m. deadline approached, they heard nothing.
“We were waiting and waiting and thought, ‘Wow, something’s wrong,’ ” said the official. “Then we got the call.”
Assange had been dragged without incident from the embassy to face hacking charges in the United States.
“We’ve ended the asylum of this spoiled brat,” Moreno crowed later in a fiery speech.
The move to extract one of the world’s most highprofile fugitives came about relatively quickly after years of what officials portrayed as obnoxious and ungracious behavior by their house guest.
Moreno, 66, who uses a wheelchair after being shot and paralyzed from the waist down in a 1998 robbery, is usually a jovial figure. But the still-under-investigation blackmail plot marked one more in a string of escalating personal attacks against him. Days before, Moreno had accused WikiLeaks of spreading damaging personal documents and photos, including several that showed him eating lobster in bed.
Hours after Assange’s arrest, Swedish programmer Ola Bini, a supporter of WikiLeaks, was arrested in the Ecuadorian capital of Quito over the alleged plot.
Ecuador gave Assange asylum inside the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over sex-crime accusations.
On a summer day, Assange moved into the compound near London’s Harrods department store for what most thought would be a short stay. Instead, the cramped quarters, where a small office was converted into a bedroom, became a permanent address.
Some regarded it as essentially a jail.
Former President Rafael Correa, whose government granted Assange refuge, had been a fierce supporter of the computer expert. Correa saw him as a digital-age Robin Hood taking on big government and corporations.
But Assange got off to a bad start with Moreno after he won the presidency in 2017, angering the chief of state with comments on Twitter ridiculing a losing candidate who had threatened to expel him.
Over the years, one highranking official said, Assange’s room at the embassy had become a “sovereign territory within a sovereign territory” that none of the staff at No. 3 Hans Crescent could enter. Embassy staff complained he smelled bad from going weeks without a shower. He also played loud music at all hours, walked around in his underwear and verbally abused the staff, officials said.
Feeding and sheltering him cost an estimated $1 million a year, authorities said.
According to the senior Ecuadorian government official, the operation went off without a hitch. The Ecuadorian ambassador asked Assange to come to his office, and Assange was read a government statement announcing his expulsion. Unarmed British police officers then hauled Assange out of the embassy.
The only worry Ecuadorian officials had at the time of the raid was a vague threat by Assange several months earlier that he would activate a device that would cause major consequences to the embassy if they ever tried to expel him.
It was never clear if the device was real and capable of physical damage, or simply metaphorical. British intelligence made sure Assange wasn’t allowed to return to his room once the raid began.