Spanish company provided CIA with information leading to Julian Assange’s arrest

“Be on the lookout tomorrow to see what you can get… and make it work.” Michelle Wallemacq, head of operations of a Spanish company called UC Global, wrote this message on December 20, 2017, to two technicians monitoring security at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was living after being granted asylum. She was alerting them to the arrival of Rommy Vallejo, the head of SENAIN, Ecuador’s secret service, who was scheduled to meet the next day with Assange to receive confidential information that could influence the cyberactivist’s future.

Vallejo had hired the services of this small company from Jerez de la Frontera in southwestern Spain to provide security for Ecuador’s diplomatic corps in London but didn’t know that it was planning to record his meeting with Assange. Vallejo was unaware that UC Global had planted hidden microphones throughout the embassy, even in the women’s bathroom. Nor did he know that UC Global’s owner, David Morales, had been sending information about Assange’s meetings with his lawyers to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) soon after he took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy.

Ecuador’s president at the time, Lenin Moreno, had ordered his staff to work with Assange’s Spanish lawyers to develop a plan to get Assange out of the embassy, grant him Ecuadorian nationality and provide a diplomatic passport. The plan was set weeks before Vallejo’s meeting and was known to only six people. When UC Global’s cameras recorded the meeting attended by Assange, his lawyer Stella Morris, Ecuadorian consul Fidel Narváez and Vallejo, it learned that the getaway would happen in four days: December 25. Assange would leave in one of the ambassador’s diplomatic cars and travel through the Eurotunnel to Switzerland or another destination in continental Europe.

“It’s very late… Because it’s so big, I put the file in a shared Dropbox [cloud data storage service] folder. Someone with experience in audio can make it more intelligible… The ecu [Vallejo] is quite audible, but the others [Assange and Morris] are very muffled,” wrote one of the technicians a few hours later to David Morales.

Morales dispatched the data in the early morning hours to his “American friends,” and the impact was immediate. The United States quickly sent an arrest warrant for Assange to the United Kingdom, so the escape plan had to be aborted. Two years later, Assange was expelled from the Ecuadorian Embassy. In June 2022, the British government ordered his extradition to the United States. Since then, Assange has been held in a London jail pending an appeal. The United States has charged him with 18 alleged crimes that could lead to a maximum of 175 years in prison.

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