Journalists Reveal Pompeo Plotted To Kidnap or Kill Assange

Sept. 27, 2021 (EIRNS)—A Sept. 26 article for Yahoo News by Zach Dorman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff reports that although Julian Assange had been spied on by U.S. intelligence agencies for years, plans to silence him—even by assassination—were catalyzed in 2017 and driven by then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo. The article is headlined “Kidnapping, Assassination and a London Shoot-Out: Inside the CIA’s Secret War Plans against WikiLeaks.” It has to be noted that co-author Isikoff was the original media purveyor of MI6 agent Christopher Steele’s fraudulent “Russiagate” dossier against President Donald Trump.

Here, we are dealing with “Messianic Mike” Pompeo. In 2017, Assange began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador’s Embassy in London. At the time, Ecuadorian officials had begun efforts to grant Assange diplomatic status, to give him cover to leave the Embassy and fly to Moscow to serve in Ecuador’s Mission there. In response, say these authors, spies from Russia, the U.S., and Britain deployed around the Embassy. The authors report that some senior officials inside the CIA and Trump Administration conferred on “options for how to assassinate him, as well spy on his WikiLeaks associates and steal their devices.” Assange had been watched by U.S. intelligence agencies for years, but plans to stop him were spurred by WikiLeaks’ ongoing publication of highly sensitive CIA hacking tools known as “Vault 7.” The CIA believed this revelation caused the largest data loss in CIA history. The authors quote an unidentified source that Pompeo was made completely furious by this event.

In the summer of 2016, at the height of the presidential election, WikiLeaks began publishing Democratic Party emails. This followed by only five weeks, WikiLeaks announcement that it had obtained files from the CIA’s secret cyber division, which it called “Vault 7.” The U.S. intelligence community insisted that the Russian GRU had hacked the DNC emails. Assange denied that the Russian government was the source. Pompeo in his first speech on April 13, 2017 as CIA Director, said: “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. 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.”

Eventually, those arguing for an approach based on the courts, rather than espionage or covert action, won the policy debate. On April 11, 2019, Ecuador’s new government revoked Assange’s asylum and evicted him; British police arrested him, and the U.S. government unsealed its initial indictment of Assange the same day, seeking his extradition from Britain.

The Yahoo report claims to be based on conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials—8 of whom, Yahoo News reports, described CIA plans to abduct Assange. The report declares, “It was a campaign spearheaded by Pompeo that bent important legal strictures, which may have jeopardized any prosecution of 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.”