Welcome to a special edition of Hard Talk from the BBC World Service. I'm Stephen Sacker.

Over the years on this program, we've spoken to a number of people who've put their careers, their personal lives and freedom at risk to reveal secrets.

We know them as whistleblowers. They've taken on governments and corporations. They've displayed extraordinary

defiance in the face of power. For some, it's meant isolation, persecution, and imprisonment.

So what motivates individuals to break codes of silence whatever the cost? Well, Julian Assange is probably the most famous recent whistleblower.

He's just regained his freedom after pleading guilty to a single charge of conspiracy

to obtain and disclose national defense information. He'd spent a dozen years in isolation. Seven years hold up in the Ecuadorian embassy in

London, and then five years in a high-security UK prison. His alleged crime, publishing the so-called

WikiLeaks papers, thousands of pages of classified information, including some that exposed ugly truths

about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. government argued that the leaks endangered

intelligence operatives in the field, an accusation that Assange and his team have always denied.

But how did Assange get these secret papers?

Well, they were sent to him by a low-level US intelligence operative called Bradley, now Chelsea Manning.

And in 2022, I spoke to her. Is it on your conscience that these names, you didn't sift the information. It turns out

you did put names into the public domain. And I wonder now, having had many years to reflect on it,

whether you regret that. Well, no, I chose certain categories of information under the understanding

of what is and should be in this kind of information. Categories, yeah, categories. Categories.

Yeah. In a sense, you put an awful lot of trust into WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. Do you regret that?

I would, if they were not available, I would have uploaded this information separately. I would have,

I was in a position where if I didn't have a publisher of last resort because I was

struggling with the New York Times. I was struggling with the Washington Post. The Washington Post was

the one that I really wanted to get to, the one that I had the most sort of interaction with.

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