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.

We know this because the Saanjian is ilk make common cause with dictators today.

Yes, they try unsuccessfully to cloak themselves in their actions in the anguish of liberty

and language of liberty and privacy, but in reality, they champion nothing but their own

celebrity.

Their currency is clickbait.

Their moral compass, nonexistent.

Their mission, personal self-aggrandism, the destruction of Western values.

That was then CIA director Mike Pompeo speaking before Washington think tank in April 2017,

depicting WikiLeaks as a grave threat to American national security.

I, like many in the audience that day, assume that Pompeo's description of WikiLeaks as

a non-state, hostile intelligence service, was a grabby rhetorical talking point.

But as my young news colleagues, Zack Dorfman and Sean Naylor and I reported this weekend,

Pompeo's branding opened the door for the CIA to plan all sorts of extreme measures to

dismantle the organization, including a snatch operation to kidnap the group's leader,

Julian Assange, then hold up inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London and possibly even to assassinate

him.

And later, when officials in Washington picked up reports that Russian operatives might

be conspiring to break Assange out of the embassy and spirit him away to Moscow, the CIA

even began planning for a gun battle on the streets of London.

What exactly did the CIA's active measures targeting Assange add up to?

...