They developed an intricate plot involving another government to help carry out an assassination but officially, the CIA doesn’t kill anyone. “Please refer to Executive Order 12333 which describes the conduct of intelligence activities, citation 2.11, which pertains to the prohibition on assassinations.” They still do it under the table though but didn’t actually kill anyone this time. The only reason it didn’t happen is because they knew what would happen if their boss, Donald Trump, found out. The spooks decided to cancel the murder mission and settle for kidnapping instead. Those plans didn’t work out either. Now, they simply have to wait and see what happens to Julian Assange in court.
CIA assassination plot
The agency called it “the largest data loss in CIA history.” Mike Pompeo took it personally enough to plot his revenge. The director and his fellow spooks “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7 they were seeing blood,” one witness relates.
A startling exposé published by Yahoo News reveals that “the CIA considered abducting, and possibly murdering” Julian Assange while the WikiLeaks founder was holed up in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy. Relying on accounts from “more than 30 former officials” the report details how fiendishly furious Donald Trump’s CIA director was.
In a follow-up interview, one of the three authors of the report, Mike Isikoff, went into some of the gory specifics of the dastardly plot for Democracy Now! and described how “WikiLeaks had been on the radar screen of U.S. intelligence for years.” Ever since 2010, the CIA was doing dirty things in secret to plug the leaks.
They were not happy that Chelsea Manning handed over State Department cables, the Afghan War Logs and Iraq War Logs. Things didn’t get any easier for Assange when he made public “the Russian-purloined DNC emails and Podesta emails during the 2016 election.”
Those things were bad enough but “what really set Mike Pompeo, the new CIA director, off was that Vault 7 leak.” Donald Trump and his public approval of what Wikileaks was doing is the only thing which thwarted the assassination plot. “We all remember ‘I love WikiLeaks’ from the 2016 campaign.”
While “Pompeo had been somewhat dismissive of the Russia allegations and Assange’s role in that, the Vault 7 leak focused his energies on getting back at WikiLeaks and Assange, at dismantling the organization.”
Non-state hostile intelligence service
A person in the room at the April 2017 meeting didn’t pick up on the significance at first. Pompeo, for the first time, described WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” The source “thought and assumed, like many, it was some kind of rhetorical talking point, a grabby line that Pompeo had came up with.”
Instead, it was the beginning of a secret plot. “In fact, that designation, internally, opened the door for the CIA to launch and plan all sorts of operations that didn’t require a presidential finding.” Congress didn’t have a “need to know” either.
Basically, the plot was “a snatch operation to take Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy.” While they were at it, why not just “extract” Assange, some suggested. “There was talk of assassination, although, we want to be clear, that never was forwarded to the White House,” Isikoff clarified. That “was internally within the CIA.”
The abduction plans were forwarded. As “part of a much broader, multi-pronged CIA attack on WikiLeaks that included stealing computers, surveillance of WikiLeaks associates, sowing discord among its members.” That includes “audio and visual surveillance of Assange from inside the Ecuadorian Embassy and monitoring of the communications and travels of Assange associates.”
That’s when White House legal staff “raised concerns that Pompeo had gone further than was legally authorized.” The CIA was picking out a hit team while over at the Justice Department they were dragging their feet and “there was still no indictment.” That threw a twist into the plot.
“If you abducted him, rendered him, where would you take him? On what grounds could you hold him in custody without an indictment?” There were “discussions about a potential gun battle on the streets of London. This was done in consultation with British authorities, who made it clear that if there was going to be any shooting, they would do it.”
