Julian Assange speaks on the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Photo / Getty Images
Julian Assange speaks on the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Photo / Getty Images
Senior CIA officials under the Trump administration discussed abducting and even assassinating Julian Assange, according to a new report that cites former agents.
Discussions on kidnapping the Australian WikiLeaks founder took place in 2017 when he was holed up inside Ecuador's London embassy, Yahoo News reports, "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," Zach Dorfman, Sean D Naylor and Michael Isikoff wrote in the lengthy investigation.
Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, 2009. Photo / Supplied
Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred "at the highest levels" of Donald Trump's administration, one former senior counterintelligence official told the publication.
The conversations were spurned by then-CIA director Mike Pompeo's and other top officials' fury at WikiLeaks' publication of "Vault 7" – a set of CIA hacking tools and a breach which the agency deemed to be the biggest data loss in its history.
Pompeo and the CIA leadership "were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7", one former Trump national security official told Yahoo, adding that "they were seeing blood".
Former US President Donald Trump and CIA director Mike Pompeo in March 2020. Photo / Getty Images
Within months of Vault 7's publication, US spies were monitoring the communications and movements of numerous WikiLeaks personnel, including audio and visual surveillance of Assange himself, former officials said.
The plot to kidnap and kill Assange was "spearheaded by Pompeo that bent important legal strictures, potentially jeopardised the Justice Department's work toward prosecuting Assange, and risked a damaging episode in the United Kingdom, the United States' closest ally".
While there's no indication that the "most extreme" measures targeting Assange were ever approved, some administration officials were so concerned that they reached out to staffers and members of Congress on the House and Senate intelligence committees.
"There were serious intel oversight concerns that were being raised through this escapade," a Trump national security official said.
The CIA and White House plans allegedly centred around the prospect of Assange being snuck out of the UK by Russian intelligence operatives to Moscow.
Scenarios to foil his departure plans included, according to three former officials, "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 tyres of a Russian plane carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow".
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrives at Belmarsh Magistrates' Court in south London. Photo / Getty Images
"We had all sorts of reasons to believe he was contemplating getting the hell out of there," the former senior administration official said.
"It was going to be like a prison break movie."
Assange is currently housed in a London prison as the courts in the UK decide whether to grant a US request to extradite him on charges of attempting to help former US Army analyst Chelsea Manning break into a classified computer network and conspiring to obtain and publish classified documents in violation of the Espionage Act.
Assange's lawyer, Barry Pollack, told the site that "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".
"My hope and expectation is that the UK courts will consider this information and it will further bolster its decision not to extradite to the US," he added.
