If only Assange had been Navalny

CIA assassination plans met with deafening silence

The western media treat Julian Assange and Alexey Navalny very differently: they prefer their heroes to take on authoritarians, not targets close to home.

In March 2017 Julian Assange was nearing the end of his fifth year holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. WikiLeaks had just released details of what it said were CIA hacking tools, which made the CIA more determined than ever to capture him. A recent article by Yahoo News journalists, based on conversations with more than 30 former US officials, reveals how they planned to do it.

First they considered kidnapping, but breaching the inviolability of the Ecuadorian embassy to abduct an Australian citizen in the heart of London would have been diplomatically tricky. Then they thought Assange was preparing to flee to Russia with Ecuadorian and Kremlin collusion, and started to consider even more fantastic schemes.

These included ‘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 tires of a Russian plane carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow... One report said Assange might try to escape the embassy hidden in a laundry cart.’ 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’. But the White House vetoed this.

CIA director Mike Pompeo was open about his intentions in a speech on 13 April 2017: ‘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.’ He added, ‘We can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to... crush us with misappropriated secrets.’ Later, he said, ‘We’re going to become a much more vicious agency in ensuring that we are (…)

Full article: 1 622 words.

Serge Halimi & Pierre Rimbert

Serge Halimi is president and editorial director Le Monde diplomatique; Pierre Rimbert is a member of its board of directors.

(1) Michel Pigenet writes about the organisation of the Estates General and their debates in Les États généraux de 1945: Une expérience démocratique oubliée (The Estates General of 1945: a forgotten experience of democracy), Éditions du Croquant, Vulaines-sur Seine, 2024. Danielle Tartakowsky examines the contents of the cahiers de doléances in 1945: les Français ont la parole: Les cahiers de doléances des États généraux de la Renaissance française (1945: The French have their say: The cahiers de doléances of the Estates General of French Renewal), Champ Vallon, Ceyzerieu, 2025. Unless indicated otherwise, all quotations come from these two books.

(2) Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘Rêves raisonnables pour des “lendemains qui chantent”: Les cahiers de doléances de la Libération’ (Reasonable dreams for brighter days ahead: The cahiers de doléances of the Liberation) in Régis Bertrand, Maryline Crivello and Jean-Marie Guillon (eds), Les Historiens et l’avenir: Comment les hommes du passé envisageaient leur futur (Historians and the future: how the men of the past imagined their future), Presses de l’Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, 2014.

(3) Lecture by Emma Biscarros, ‘Les Etats généraux de 1945 à Villeurbanne’ (The 1945 Estates General in Villeurbanne), Villeurbanne, 6 September 2025.

(4) Claire Andrieu, ‘Le programme du CNR dans la dynamique de construction de la nation résistante’ (The CNR programme and the making of the Resistance nation), Histoire @ Politique, vol 24, no 3, Paris, 2014.