Julian Assange is an Australian who started a website called WikiLeaks. He published secret government documents. Videos of US military killing civilians. Hundreds of thousands of war reports. A quarter of a million diplomatic cables. The CIA discussed assassinating him. He spent seven years trapped in an embassy in London. Then five years in a maximum security prison. The US charged him with 17 counts of espionage. The maximum sentence was 175 years. He pleaded guilty to one count. He walked free after serving five years. He is now home in Australia. He was the first publisher convicted under the Espionage Act. The judge who sentenced him as a teenage hacker called it intelligent inquisitiveness.
In 2017, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency personally requested options for assassinating an Australian citizen. Mike Pompeo asked his staff to prepare plans for killing Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. They also discussed kidnapping him in a daylight operation that would involve a shootout on the streets of Knightsbridge. Yahoo News reported all of this in September 2021. More than 30 former US officials confirmed it. The CIA declined to comment.
He had published classified documents on his website.
The making of a legend
Julian Paul Hawkins was born on July 3, 1971, in Townsville, Queensland. His mother Christine was a visual artist. His biological father, John Shipton, was an anti-war activist. The couple separated before Julian was born. When Julian was one, Christine married Brett Assange, a theatre director who ran a touring company. Julian took his stepfather’s surname.
By the time he was 14, Julian and his mother had moved 37 times, according to his biographers. Townsville, Magnetic Island, Byron Bay, Lismore, Adelaide, Melbourne. Christine bought him a Commodore 64 when he was 13. The Sydney Morning Herald reported it cost $600. A sacrifice that required the family to move.
At 16, he chose the hacker name “Mendax.” From the Latin “splendide mendax.” Nobly untruthful. He joined two other hackers to form the International Subversives. Over four years, Mendax penetrated the Melbourne master terminal of Nortel, the Canadian telecommunications giant. He hacked US Department of Defense systems, including MILNET. He accessed Pentagon networks and NASA.
The Guardian later called him “probably Australia’s most accomplished hacker.”
In September 1991, a Nortel administrator detected his presence on the system and drove into the office at 3am. The Australian Federal Police raided his home in October. They had tapped his phone. He was charged with 31 counts of hacking in 1994. He pleaded guilty to 25.
The judge sentenced him to a good behaviour bond and a fine. Then he said this:
“There is just no evidence that there was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to surf through these various computers.”
He was 20 years old. A judge in an Australian courtroom had just described what would become his life’s work as intelligent inquisitiveness.
Conspiracy as governance
Assange studied programming, mathematics, physics, philosophy, and neuroscience at Central Queensland University and the University of Melbourne. He never completed a degree. He co-invented a deniable encryption system called Rubberhose. He was the primary researcher for Suelette Dreyfus’s 1997 book “Underground,” about the Australian hacker scene, in which he appeared as “Mendax.”
On December 3, 2006, he published an essay called “Conspiracy as Governance.” It was a mathematical theory of how authoritarian governments function as networks of information exchange. His argument: the most effective way to disrupt these networks was to leak information, increasing the cost of internal communication among conspirators until the system could no longer function.
He had registered the domain wikileaks.org two months earlier. He was building the tool to test his theory.
The first publication came in December 2006. A document from a Somali rebel leader. The first major scoop: November 2007, the standard operating procedures for Guantanamo Bay’s Camp Delta. Then Bank Julius Baer documents in 2008 exposing offshore tax evasion. Bank Julius Baer obtained a court injunction to shut down the wikileaks.org domain. The injunction backfired. The publicity brought global attention to WikiLeaks.
By 2009, WikiLeaks had published 6,780 Congressional Research Service reports and the British National Party membership list. Each release was larger than the last. The theory was working.
Collateral Murder. Cablegate. The Arab Spring.
In April 2010, WikiLeaks published a classified US military video from a July 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad. The video showed the helicopter crew killing Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, his driver Saeed Chmagh, and at least nine other people. The crew then opened fire on a van that stopped to help the wounded. Two children in the van were seriously injured.
The US military had told Reuters the journalists were “killed during a firefight.” It had refused to release the video for three years. WikiLeaks titled the 17-minute edited version “Collateral Murder.”
The source was Chelsea Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst with access to SIPRNet, the military’s classified network.
What followed was the biggest cascade of classified document publications in history. July 2010: 91,731 Afghan War field reports revealing 144 previously unreported incidents of civilians killed by coalition forces. October 2010: 391,832 Iraq War field reports documenting approximately 109,032 people killed between 2004 and 2009. Sixty-six thousand and eighty-one were civilians. Fifteen thousand of those deaths had never been reported.
November 2010: 251,287 US State Department diplomatic cables. Cablegate. The largest set of confidential documents ever released. Among the revelations: Arab leaders privately urging the US to attack Iran. Saudi Arabia as the largest source of funding for Sunni terrorist groups. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordering diplomats to collect biometric data on UN officials.
The Cablegate cables about Tunisia documented the Ben Ali family’s corruption in detail. A blog called Nawaat translated them into Arabic and French as “Tunileaks.” The Tunisian revolution began in December 2010. It triggered the Arab Spring.
The Australian government’s response was immediate. Prime Minister Julia Gillard declared WikiLeaks’ activities “illegal” and “grossly irresponsible.” Sixteen days later, the Australian Federal Police concluded its investigation. WikiLeaks had broken no Australian laws. The AFP formally advised the Attorney-General that no law had been breached.
Gillard did not retract the claim. The Sydney Morning Herald’s headline: “Law not broken but WikiLeaks illegal: PM.”
The embassy. The siege. The spies.
In August 2010, two women went to Swedish police regarding their encounters with Assange during a visit to Stockholm. A warrant was issued and withdrawn the same day. The chief prosecutor assessed there were no grounds for a rape charge. A different prosecutor reopened the investigation weeks later. Assange acknowledged the encounters and said all activity was consensual. He offered to be questioned at the embassy or via video link. Sweden declined.
A European Arrest Warrant was issued. Assange fought extradition through every level of the British courts. Westminster Magistrates’ Court. The High Court. The Supreme Court, which dismissed his final appeal by a 5-2 majority in May 2012.
On June 19, 2012, he walked into the Ecuadorian embassy at 3 Hans Crescent, Knightsbridge, and requested political asylum. Ecuador granted it. He would not leave for 2,501 days.
Conditions inside deteriorated. Ecuador restricted internet access, visitors, and eventually required Assange to pay for his own food and medical expenses. His health declined.
In December 2017, a Spanish security firm called UC Global, hired by Ecuador to provide embassy security, began installing hidden cameras and microphones. They recorded meetings between Assange and his lawyers, including privileged legal consultations with Australian barristers Geoffrey Robertson QC (Queen’s Counsel) and Jennifer Robinson. The recordings were shared with the CIA.
Spain’s High Court opened criminal proceedings. UC Global’s founder was arrested. The CIA had been watching Assange’s lawyers prepare his defence.
The CIA discussed killing him
This is the part that sounds like a conspiracy theory but is not.
In September 2021, Yahoo News published an investigation based on interviews with more than 30 former US officials. In 2017, CIA Director Mike Pompeo and other senior officials had discussed kidnapping Assange from the embassy. The plans ranged from a diplomatic confrontation to what officials described as a “nearly impossible” daylight extraction that could involve a shootout on the streets of London.
Some officials discussed assassinating him. Pompeo had requested “sketches” of options for killing Assange, according to a former intelligence official quoted in the report. The discussions were prompted by WikiLeaks’ publication of Vault 7 in March 2017, a trove of 8,761 documents detailing the CIA’s hacking arsenal. CIA capabilities for turning Samsung smart TVs into listening devices, bypassing encryption on WhatsApp and Signal, and a unit called UMBRAGE that collected attack code from other nations to leave false forensic fingerprints.
The Vault 7 source, former CIA software engineer Joshua Schulte, was later convicted of espionage and sentenced to 40 years in prison. The longest sentence ever imposed for unauthorized disclosure of national defence information.
“I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism.”
- Julian Assange, addressing the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly, October 1, 2024
Belmarsh. The deal. The walk home.
On April 11, 2019, Ecuador revoked Assange’s asylum. President Lenin Moreno called him a “spoiled brat” and a “miserable hacker.” Metropolitan Police entered the embassy and carried him out.
The US unsealed an indictment the same day. Then an 18-count superseding indictment in May. Seventeen counts under the Espionage Act of 1917, a World War I-era law originally written to prosecute spies. Maximum sentence: 175 years. It had never before been used to prosecute a publisher.
At his sentencing for bail jumping, the judge called him a “narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interests.” He was sent to Belmarsh, a maximum security prison in southeast London.
”There is just no evidence that there was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to surf through these various computers.” - The judge who sentenced him in 1994
In January 2021, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled against extradition to the US. Her reasoning: it would be “oppressive” due to Assange’s mental health and the risk of suicide under US prison conditions. She rejected his broader arguments about press freedom. The US appealed. The High Court accepted diplomatic assurances that he would not be held in solitary confinement or at ADX Florence, a supermax prison in Colorado.
During the Belmarsh years, Assange married Stella Moris, a lawyer who had joined his legal team in 2011. They had two sons during the embassy years. Their existence was kept secret until April 2020. The wedding took place at Belmarsh in March 2022. Four guests. No photographs.
In Australia, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had been saying “enough is enough” since opposition. After Labor won in May 2022, he authorised what Reuters called “quiet diplomacy.” Ambassador Kevin Rudd in Washington and High Commissioner Stephen Smith in London negotiated for 18 months. In February 2024, the Australian House of Representatives passed a motion 86 to 42 calling on the US and UK to let Assange come home.
In August 2023, US Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy publicly flagged a possible plea deal.
On June 25, 2024, Assange appeared before Chief Judge Ramona Manglona at the US District Court in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory in the western Pacific. He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to obtain and disclose national defence information. The prosecution recommended 62 months. He had already served 62 months.
The hearing lasted approximately one hour. He walked out of the courtroom a free man. He flew to Canberra that night.
What happened next
Assange now lives in Australia with his wife and two sons. His guilty plea carries no restrictions. He is a free citizen. He addressed the Council of Europe in Strasbourg in October 2024.
But the conviction stands. He is the first publisher ever convicted under the Espionage Act for publishing classified information. That precedent can be cited against any journalist who handles classified material. The Espionage Act contains no public interest defence.
Chelsea Manning served approximately seven years before President Obama commuted her 35-year sentence in January 2017. She was jailed again from March 2019 to March 2020 for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. She was fined $256,000.
The most contested claim about WikiLeaks is that its publications got people killed. At Manning’s sentencing hearing in July 2013, Brigadier General Robert Carr, head of the Pentagon’s Information Review Task Force, testified under oath that he could identify no specific instance where an individual was killed as a result of the disclosures.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called the releases “awkward” and “embarrassing.” Not catastrophic.
The second contested claim is the 2016 DNC and Podesta email releases. The US intelligence community concluded with high confidence that Russian GRU officers, Russia’s military intelligence agency, were the source. Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 GRU officers in July 2018. Assange denied the source was Russian. The content of the emails was never disputed as authentic.
Sigurdur Thordarson, the FBI’s star witness in the Assange case, admitted in June 2021 that he had fabricated evidence used in the US indictment. He had been recruited as an FBI informant inside WikiLeaks. The Justice Department did not withdraw the indictment.
The Australian Federal Police found no crime. The Pentagon’s own review found no deaths. The FBI’s key witness admitted lying. The CIA discussed killing him. He spent 14 years in various forms of confinement. He walked free after pleading guilty to one count on a Pacific island.
The judge in 1994 was right. Intelligent inquisitiveness.
By the numbers
- Classified documents published: 700,000+
- Days in the Ecuadorian embassy: 2,501
- Years in Belmarsh prison: 5
- Espionage Act charges: 17
- Maximum sentence faced: 175 years
- Charges he pleaded guilty to: 1
- Sentence served: 62 months (time already served)
- Australian prime ministers who dealt with his case: 4
- Australians who wanted prosecution ended: 79% (SMH poll, 2023)
- House motion to bring him home: 86-42 (February 2024)
- People killed by the leaks (per Pentagon): 0 confirmed
- Times Espionage Act used against a publisher before Assange: 0
Sources
- Yahoo News - Inside the CIA’s Plans for WikiLeaks
- The New Yorker - No Secrets (2010 Assange Profile)
- The Monthly - The Cypherpunk Revolutionary
- US DOJ - Superseding Indictment
- US DOJ - Plea Guilty and Sentenced
- BBC - Julian Assange: A Timeline
- Guardian - How Australia Pushed for Assange’s Freedom
- Reuters - How Australia’s Quiet Diplomacy Led Assange to Freedom
- ABC Australia - Assange Freed After Pleading Guilty
- SMH - Law Not Broken But WikiLeaks Illegal: PM
- SMH - Key Witness Admits to Lies in Indictment (Thordarson)
- WikiLeaks 10-Year Timeline
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