A New York court has concluded that the Spanish company UC Global S.L. and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) violated the rights and privacy of U.S. citizens who visited Julian Assange during his stay at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.
Four U.S. citizens, two lawyers and two journalists, sued Mike Pompeo, former director of the CIA, the intelligence agency, and David Morales, former Spanish military officer who owned the company based in Jerez de la Frontera (Cádiz) that was in charge of security at the diplomatic legation, for espionage.
Judge John G. Koeltl has issued a ruling in which he recognizes the violation of the plaintiffs' rights when employees of UC Global S.L. took their mobile phones and photographed their passwords and contents, practices that he considers illegal. On the other hand, the microphones of their conversations at the embassy and the photographs in their passports are not illegal, according to this resolution. And he argues this because of the "no expectation of privacy (of the plaintiffs) in that embassy" as it is a public place.
The ruling is a success for the plaintiffs and a problem for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, as the former will now demand the discovery (declassification) of the CIA operation. And the judge will have to authorize it, according to legal sources. A secret mission, the details of which (audios, videos, emails and documents) were revealed by an investigation by EL PAÍS and whose evidence has been presented by the four victims of espionage before the New York courts.
The judge notes in his verdict that the plaintiffs have presented "sufficient evidence" that Morales acted as an agent or collaborator and following the instructions of the CIA and its director Pompeo, former secretary of state during the Donald Trump administration (2017-2021). The decision rejects the defendants' arguments to dismiss the entire complaint.
The lawsuit against Mike Pompeo was filed in August 2021 by lawyers Margaret Ratner Kunstler and Deborah Hrbek and journalists John Goetz and Charles Glass, both specialists in national security issues. All of them visited Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, as did hundreds of others, and, according to the lawsuit, more than 100 U.S. citizens, including the Australian's lawyers and doctors, were spied on by order of the CIA during Pompeo's tenure. The New York magistrate includes in his ruling the statements of the former director of the CIA in which he pointed to the founder of WikiLeaks as a "target" of the agency and advanced that he would begin a "long campaign" against his organization.
The work of EL PAÍS revealed in 2019 that the company UC Global S.L. spiedfor the United States on Assange's conversations with his lawyers and collaborators when they were preparing their defense strategy against that country's extradition request for revealing secret information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Weeks later, police arrested its owner and director, David Morales. The former soldier has since been provisionally released and the National Court is investigating him for alleged crimes against privacy and the secrecy of lawyer-client communications, misappropriation, bribery and money laundering.
Microphones in bathrooms
The spying on Assange began in December 2017. Morales ordered his workers to install new video cameras with microphones in the embassy, as well as listening devices in fire extinguishers and in the ladies' bathroom, where lawyers met on suspicion of being spied on. The former Marine asked his technicians to place an external streaming access on the cameras so that all the recordings could be instantly accessed from the United States. And it enabled three access channels "one for Ecuador, one for us and one for X," according to emails sent to its workers. The system allowed Ecuadorian agents to ignore open access to U.S. espionage.
The information collected from each visit that Assange received was sent to an FTP (file transfer protocol) server in Jerez de la Frontera. A Big Brother in which hundreds of profiles, reports of each visit, videos, audios, the mobile phones of the visitors and their nationalities, professions: lawyers, diplomats, doctors, journalists, etc., were computerized and archived. Workers of UC Global S.L. and several protected witnesses who have testified in the court case claim that this server was accessed by the CIA, and that Morales did not want to reveal the identity of "his American friends." Folders with the name "CIA" have been found on the former Marine's laptop. The Spanish Judicial Police omitted this finding in the framework of the judicial investigation being conducted by magistrate Santiago Pedraz.
The UC Global S.L. installed, also on Morales' orders, stickers that eliminate vibration in the windows of the rooms frequented by the Australian cyberactivist to facilitate the capture of conversations from the outside using laser microphones allegedly used by the CIA.
The espionage of the Australian cyberactivist multiplied when it was suspected that he planned to leave the embassy in 2017 with Ecuadorian diplomatic status and head to Russia, something that his lawyers and Assange deny. The final destination, they say, was Geneva (Switzerland). Among those spied on at the embassy is Glenn Greenwald, the man to whom Edward Snowden gave the exclusive on the massive spying of the US intelligence agency NSA. During his visit, he was photographed with the visas to Russia in his passport, as well as his mobile phone.
Among Morales' clients was the late gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson, owner of Las Vegas Sands, a friend of former President Trump and a major donor to the Republican Party. The former soldier himself offered security to Adelson's yacht when it sailed through Mediterranean waters.
Investigacion@elpais.es
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