WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was to be secretly whisked away from London’s Ecuadorian embassy all the way to Russia, an explosive report in the Guardian claims.
The purported plan, which was to be carried on Christmas Eve of 2017, never materialized after it was deemed “too risky” by all those involved in the operation. Kremlin had reportedly offered support for Assange’s escape plan by helping him leave the UK and finally settle in Russia.
The plan involved furnishing Assange with diplomatic documents so that Ecuador could claim that he enjoyed diplomatic immunity. He was to be whisked away in a diplomatic vehicle. As part of the plan, “agents from an international security company camped out in a two-bedroom basement flat on Basil Street” close to the embassy where Assange has been staying for six years.
One of the key men in the aforementioned plan was Fidel Narváez, who, until recently, was Ecuador’s London consul. According to the report, Narváez was the link between Russia and Assange, whom he has known for many years.
But Narváez has denied the accusations, justifying his two visits to the Russian embassy in London as part of broader “open-public meetings” aimed at resolving the UK-Russia crisis. Even so, Narváez is known to have been instrumental in ensuring Edward Snowden’s safe-passage to Russia from Hong Kong, after the former NSA-contractor revealed damning information about America’s security agency practices of surveillance. At the time, the then president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, had maintained that Narváez had acted on his own accord.
Revealed: Russia’s secret plan to help Julian Assange escape from UK https://t.co/moQ5kmuTx1
— The Guardian (@guardian) September 21, 2018
Rommy Vallejo, the head of Ecuador’s intelligence agency, had reportedly traveled to London on December 15 of last year to help with the plan, but when it was aborted with only days to go, he left the English capital. He has since been reported to be in Nicaragua.
Assange has been accused of playing an important role in Russia’s attempts to intervene in the 2016 presidential elections. According to Mueller’s indictments of 13 Russian intelligence officials accused of hacking into DNC’s servers, WikiLeaks founder Assange published more than 50,000 documents stolen from the servers, effectively helping Donald Trump win the election.
Although Assange never reveals his sources, he has claimed that he did not receive the stolen emails and documents from Russia. But confidential visitor logs show that Assange had received several Russian nationals at the Ecuadorian embassy in the summer of 2016, including officials of the Russian government’s state-channel and international propaganda arm, RT .