Was Assange an asset for the US government?
Was Assange an asset for the US government?
Amid the end of Assange's trial, we look at his past and the history of Wikileaks.
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Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks — the famous website dedicated to publishing classified documents — has finally been freed from jail, perhaps more accurately called limbo, and was sent on his way home to Australia as part of a guilty plea deal he took with the US government.
The news come after a long battle lasting over ten years. In 2010, Assange was summoned by a British court for accusations of sexual offenses made in Sweden, and despite Assange not being a British national.
The summons came shortly after Assange had published the “Collateral Murder” video on Wikileaks (leaked by then-US soldier Chelsea Manning) and the leak of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables originating from US embassies.
This formed the basis of over 14 years of persecution for Assange. Very quickly, the charges made their way to Interpol, no doubt helped by Assange’s reputation behind Wikileaks — sexual offenses rarely make it to Interpol otherwise, especially as an appeal lowered them to much more “lenient” charges — and often end up not being prosecuted and the victims ignored if the suspect leaves the country.
Still, Assange surrendered willingly to the UK for his preliminary hearing. While there, he sought asylum to Ecuador and thus began his 7-year-long stay in a room of the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Assange was arrested in 2019 as a change in government in Ecuador two years prior aligned the government with the US and imperial order. The new government, headed by President Lenin Moreno, was thus keen to surrender him to their exploiters and allies of its bourgeoisie.
Assange was then tried in various different courts, but not for the initial charges that had him seek refuge in 2012. Those charges had reached their statute of limitations in 2015 and as such, could not be tried. By 2019, Assange was perhaps the world’s most wanted man and that is precisely when the US finally charged him, despite having him placed under investigation since 2010.
The timing is uncanny. A right-wing government, propped up by the US, is elected in Ecuador in 2017. Then, despite having had almost 10 years to charge Assange (with the involvement of the NSA, CIA and FBI and all their surveillance capabilities), they only moved ahead in 2019. Right at the same time, Assange was kicked out of the Ecuadorian embassy not because of any requests, but because he was, according to Ecuador, becoming impossible to live with (allegations which those who visited him denied).
The first of his trials since 2019, which I have been following closely, were made in the UK and were meant to determine if he would be extradited to the US to face charges of conspiracy relating to national security.
Such proceedings are normally not done over quickly, and that was indeed the case with Assange. A hearing has to be set — usually quite some time in the future — and heard for several days. Then, the accused is allowed to appeal the decision to a higher court, repeating the process until the last court is reached.
Certainly, if the UK had wanted to, they could have moved Assange to the US very quickly once he had come under their authority, citing some obscure law of national security or other and organizing a transfer with the help of MI5. You will see that this is a recurring theme when trying to dig into Assange’s life: he was public enemy number one for a decade, but at the same time was treated like any common petty thief.
The extradition hearings lasted for almost 5 full years. On June 25, 2024, Assange was finally released and the case settled. He accepted a guilty plea deal for which the US prosecution sought a 62-month sentence, the same length that he had already served after his arrest in 2019, thereby effectively having served his sentence.
He was immediately released and made to board a private flight first to US colonial territory in Saipan to finalize the deal, and then back to Australia, of which he is a national.
With this chapter ostensibly closed and him making the news over the world, we must however look at some overlooked spots surrounding him and his project Wikileaks which have so far not received as much investigation.
The reasons Wikileaks might be a US intelligence trap
When looking at the early history of Wikileaks, I am reminded of the Paradise Papers leaked in 2017, which followed the Panama Papers by one year. Except the Paradise Papers focused mostly on non-western individuals and were released by the “International Consortium of Investigate Journalists”, which, despite being investigative journalism, only seems to target enemies of the US. The ICIJ received over 100 million dollars from eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar, for example, who also works closely with CIA cutouts like USAID and the NED, a CIA front for funding regime change organizations abroad.
Ties with intelligence agencies are often very difficult to prove conclusively until one day the smoking gun drops and all suspicions are confirmed. In the case of Wikileaks or the Paradise Papers or anything else, we can only point at circumstantial — but ultimately mounting — evidence that points to patterns we have seen before.
But it’s also far from the first time such allegations would be proven true. Radio Free Europe, for example, was for years operating as an “independent” media outlet in Europe and the Soviet Union, with mounting suspicion from authorities there (but no conclusive proof), until it was finally revealed that it was a CIA front (and by that same CIA no less). Same for Crypto AG, which worked from Switzerland with several governments, despite suspicion that it was strange for this company to suddenly pop up and offer world-tier cryptography services to foreign governments. They too were eventually found out to be a CIA front. We also remember Bellingcat in a more recent example: the “home of investigative journalists”, who also happens to go solely after enemies of the US and which is funded by the NED too.
It is also not my goal to conclusively prove or even allege that Assange is a federal asset. Rather, I think there are enough worrying questions that should be made known more broadly — after all, as a champion of the freedom of the press, Assange himself should welcome the scrutiny, though I expect he will be busy enjoying his much-awaited release for the coming days.
Let’s start at the beginning. Wikileaks was established in 2006 (and opened in 2007) as a wiki that anyone could send documents to, whose “primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their own governments and corporations.”[1]
This should already seem suspicious. A western (Australian) project aiming to blow the whistle on enemies of the US/UK imperial order is nothing new today and wasn’t really new either in the 2000s. They’re only missing Latin America, really, and they would be covering the entire non-Western world which, incidentally, the US is very keen on destabilizing for their imperialism.
This also raises the question why Wikileaks did not “leak” their own ties, but we’ll get back to that in due time.
In their 2006 opening announcement, Wikileaks said they had more than 1.2 million documents ready to be released, all pertaining to governments the US considered hostile and was dying to have coup’d.
In that same announcement, Wikileaks also wrote that “If a document comes from the Chinese government, the entire Chinese dissident community can freely scrutinize and discuss it; if a document arrives from Iran, the entire Farsi community can analyze it and put it in context.”
Notably absent was the United States. By 2006, 9/11 had happened, the Patriot Act was in full effect, the US was present in both Iraq and Afghanistan and the abuses at Abu Ghraib had been made public already.
But China and Iran were back then already big enemies to the US government. Is that why they were singled out in this announcement?
In 2007, a few months before Wikileaks opened, they were already coming under scrutiny from skeptics. From the linked Time article (of all places!):
Finding out much about the site or who is behind it is not easy, which may explain the suspicion building around it. The site says its organizers include Chinese dissidents, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the U.S., Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.
Again, notably absent were US soldiers, intelligence analysts, senatorial aides or anything of the sort. But somehow, Wikileaks easily found Chinese dissidents to help them (despite Chinese dissidents saying for years that speaking up against the Chinese government is very dangerous to their lives!)
John Young, the founder of cryptome.org and a member of Wikileaks from the start, left the group in early 2007, calling it a “CIA conduit.” He has since rescinded that statement, but leaked more than 150 pages of emails sent between Wikileaks founders when he left.
It is also quite interesting that Wikileaks received such huge visibility in the media, when they were far from the only whistleblowing project back in 2006, and had not even made a mark yet. Wikileaks appeared in Time magazine as well as the Washington Post and said that visits to the website skyrocketed to the “hundreds of thousands” from the media coverage, despite having then only released some documents from Somalia which, on top of it all, experts said were already outdated.
At the same time, Wikileaks said to Reuters that “it counts Chinese dissidents among its international team of founders, and some of its advisers are Russian and Tibetan refugees.”
Some of these Chinese dissidents were Wang Youcai, Wang Dan and Xiao Qang, who were three of the student leaders in the 1989 Tiannamen Protests in Beijing, China. They were among the last to leave the square, and thus likely CIA assets sent to subvert the protests in order to call for regime change; most of the civil protestors had already cleared the square by the time the army came in to evacuate it. If Wang Youcai’s criminal record in China is anything to go by, that assertion is certainly correct.
Another advisor to Wikileaks, Tashi Khamistsang, worked on RFA, or Radio Free Asia, which is a sister company to Radio Free Europe and part of the same CIA network. He has been groomed to be active in pro-Tibetan separatism since the age of 6 and even served as an aide or advisor to the Dalai Llama, who was funded by the CIA from 1959 to the late 70s.
Wikileaks’ “Advisory Board” is very secretive however, to the point that many people working on Wikileaks know nothing about it, even when they are said to be a part of it. Khamsistsang, for example, said in an email he had “never agreed to be an advisor” (Khamsistsang is at the same time clearly a CIA asset and would have no reason to tell the truth on his ties to Wikileaks when asked by the media).
It seems that Wikileaks started on a basis of having pro-Western advisors on its board of “experts” — those were tasked with making sure documents were legitimate and ready to be published — while at the same time looking mainly for pro-Western dissidents to publish documents.
I am purposely not singling out Assange here, and that is because he is only one piece of Wikileaks. We will come back to him later but Wikileaks is certainly bigger than just Assange — or at least started out that way — and it is important to separate the two.
To that end, it is possible that Assange was just naive and thought his project was sincere. And maybe Wikileaks was — and still is — sincere. Maybe it has no ties to intelligence agencies. Maybe it did, or planned to, but doesn’t anymore.
Like we said earlier, it’s always circumstantial until it’s not.
It is however concerning that in 2011, Assange told Reuters that “China is [Wikileaks’] real enemy” and that Wikileaks was looking at ways to circumvent their “censorship”, thereby moving from being simply a publisher to an actual infiltrator.
Still, we have to remember Assange was persecuted for over ten years by the UK and US governments, the two peas in the pod of imperialism, and have to ask: what changed?
In 2010, Wikileaks published the famous “Collateral Murder” video, which showed US troops in Iraq gunning down two Reuters journalist from their chopper.
The next year, Wikileaks then released 250,000 diplomatic cables from US embassies around the world.
These two events put it on the US’ government radar and soon after, Assange started having problems with the law for the first time with Wikileaks (he had previously been a hacker in the 90s and had ran into the Australian authorities for it).
At the same time, the two leaks were not entirely damaging to the US government. The leaks actually helped spark the “Arab Spring”, the name given to the series of color revolutions aiming to topple governments in North Africa.
A reporter with the Guardian described that though UK and Tunisian relations continued as tensions mounted in the region, it was clear that the diplomatic cables had sparked a realisation with the Tunisian people that if the world knew and arguably empathised, then 'enough was enough'.
And on the Collateral Murder video, let’s face it: not much came out of it. The video was taken in 2007 and only published in 2010, conveniently going over a Presidential election in 2008 in the US and thus not assigning blame to either Bush or Obama. The murderers were never prosecuted. All that happened was that Manning went to prison over it, and the US state apparatus got rid of a potential liability in its armed forces.
This arrest also signaled that Wikileaks was incapable — if not entirely unwilling — to protect the anonymity of their US whistleblowers.
And we have to ask, again, how Wikileaks and Assange got to be in the spotlight so often from 2006 on (before their website was even online, having been “leaked” in a nice spin on the story that was sure to make it go viral) despite not doing investigative journalism themselves and despite plenty of other investigative journalists struggling to get published. Instead, Wikileaks often made worldwide news and got to be in very famous newspapers routinely, despite not publishing their own findings.
It is an observable fact that Assange never felt threatened by his own (Western) governments for his work. He was first arrested in Sweden, after all, which is a 14 Eyes country and member of the EU. He is an Australian national, which is a vassal state to the UK and US, and never seemed to care to change that. He surrendered willingly to the UK for his preliminary trial. He was correct to think that being tried in the US would be a death sentence for him, but that seems to have come too little too late. Is it possible that anyone in this line of work expects the UK to be entirely independent of the US, and feel safe going there while knowing that the NSA and FBI are mounting an investigation against them?
Snowden, on the other hand, had the right idea by fleeing to Russia the first chance he got.
Now that we know the facts, some questions remain to be able to craft a narrative out of it:
What would be the purpose of Wikileaks being a federal outfit?
Some have pointed to Wikileaks being a limited hangout. Through the guise of publishing actual information, a limited hangout is able to build credibility among the audience it seeks to co-opt and then can do either of two things:
Downplay actual damaging reports and
Go after the actual enemies the outlet wants to and garner support for it.
Limited hangouts are nothing new, and the term dates back to the 50s. I am reminded here of “journalist” Edward Hunter, a CIA agent, who brought the term brainwashing to the mainstream (his article also helped form the basis for prosecuting GIs returning from the barbaric invasion of Korea when they realized they had no reason to be there).
Wikileaks, however, was never formed to build credibility around damaging the US or the West in general; it was purposely founded to go after the enemies of the US government.
Likewise, we saw that the leaked cables and Collateral Murder did not damage the government that much, and even helped in the Arab Spring — they would have been released in the first phase of the limited hangout, where it is still building credibility.
For these reasons, I don’t necessarily buy the limited hangout theory. But I don’t really have anything better to offer, to be honest.
My opinion is that Wikileaks might have started as an intelligence outfit meant to destabilize enemy countries of the US, but that did not necessarily pan out. Post-2010, Wikileaks provided many more documents on the US, such as Vault 7 in 2017, detailing the CIA’s arsenal of hacking tools — although admittedly, everyone pretty much already knew the NSA and CIA had every tool at their disposal to get into any network or device they wanted.
And there’s no denying Wikileaks has been very useful to independent journalists around the world, including those who expose the empire for what it is.
Similarly, we can’t deny that Assange was persecuted for over 10 years, confined to a small room in the Ecuadorian embassy with no possibilities of ever leaving — a golden prison. And that he was thrown out of it by Lenin Moreno, a comprador to the USA.
Perhaps Assange felt confident in publishing the Collateral Murder video, or perhaps he did it at the request of handlers — he may not have even known they were handlers. Is it possible that he ran afoul of them, and then became an enemy? That would certainly coincide with the NSA and FBI investigations into him started in 2010, with the NSA even putting Assange on the Manhunting Timeline, an annual account of efforts made to kill or capture terrorists.
I have also seen that Assange might have been prosecuted to build more of his credibility and brand, but I find it unlikely that anyone would endure 10 years of this treatment for the fame of it.
Is Wikileaks a psyop?
Like I said in the beginning, I don’t aim to smear Wikileaks; I reserve my judgment until more evidence (exonerating or otherwise) comes out.
I have come across all this information while Assange was incarcerated post-2019, and decided to make it into a cohesive article before any new information comes out now that Assange has been freed.
My goal is to give you all the information I can so you can make an informed decision. I think Assange’s release signals a new chapter for Wikileaks, but nobody knows what it will look like yet. When that chapter does start, we will have all this prior information to draw on and analyze it with to ultimately figure out the truth.
What do you think?