Julian Assange Timeline
Emma Best has released a marvelous twenty five year summary.
It’s fairly rare for me to restack someone else’s work, but Julian Assange: Journalist, or Russian Asset?, by Jackie Singh, took less than sixty seconds for me to decide. Inside her editorial was a treasure chest, Russia, Assange, and Wikileaks: 1998 - 2023 by Emma Best of DDoSecrets. The post is in temporal order with 203 public citations.
Best’s OSINT work here is top notch - this is from the article:
Many of the events described here have been denied by involved parties at various points. It would be impractical and confusing to include and analyze the variations of every denial. In lieu of attempting that, it is best to assume that except where noted:
WikiLeaks and Julian Assange deny connections to or involvement with Russian officials and intelligence, including denying using them as sources
Edward Snowden and his associates have denied connections to or cooperation with Russian officials and intelligence
I’ve attempted to identify and cite the most precise, reliable and relevant dates for all events. As part of their operational security and due to imprecise memories, several people involved have given vague or contradicting dates for some events. Dates may also vary by up to a day depending on local time.
Once Jackie’s article was restacked, I fired up Maltego and got to work …
Attention Conservation Notice:
This whole situation delights, infuriates, and saddens me, all at the same time. The only consistent theme for the time covered by Best’s article has been that religiously motivated extremists in this country will stop at nothing to destroy our democracy. Everyone who attempts to intervene, for whatever reason, gets their life shredded in the process. If you’re not seeing that just yet, look a little closer …
Mechanics:
I started Maltego, pasted in the URL for Best’s article, and let IBM’s Watson do Named Entity Recognition. The system came back with a mix of a hundred Person and Company entities, which I cleaned of any noise, and then integrated with my existing MAGA world graph. The different entities you see here are just my organizing methods. When something has an “Actual” after its name that means there are a lot of articles where its been named in the title, this naming convention lets me find just things, and not all the articles about them.
The MAGA graph I keep has been mentioned here and there, most notably in Don’t Do The Crime. What started as an attempt to make sense of news in the fall of 2020 has turned into something I didn’t intend, but it’s worked remarkably well. Most Maltego graphs are meant for link analysis, seeing what connects where. Prior to the integration of Best’s work that graph has 5,858 entities pulled from 1,410 articles and court documents. Its value becomes apparent when you want to query it - pick any two or three names from among the 3,606(!) people who’ve qualified for membership and I can quickly tell you how they’re connected, with articles to back that up. As an example, here are Julian Assange, FBI CI Charles Johnson, and dirty FBI agent Charles McGonigal.
If you were new to this situation you’d have to read for a week solid with a notebook and pencil nearby to get all of that. Roughly once a month since I’ve started keeping this I hear from a reporter who’s looking for information on a specific individual or an episode. I can give them back a picture and a list of articles in a matter of a couple minutes.
Feeling::Delighted:
As I noted in Julian Assange Flipping? I am pleased that this episode is FINALLY coming to an end. He’s a Russian agent and anyone for whom that was not clear after 2016 deserves whatever they get. I don’t care if they let him go home to Australia, as long as his access to the world is limited to a flip phone and a newspaper subscription. If he burns heckin’ EVERYBODY I’ve already got a bag of marshmallows on hand.
Feeling::Infuriated:
Hotel California, Internet Style is one of those rare moments, at least for the 2020s, where I vent a bit in the open. I haven’t broadcast the particulars but there have been some other notable folks who had some sort of Wikileaks connection creeping about since roughly the time of Assange’s mid-2020 superseding indictment. They SAY stupid things. They DO stupid things. There’s a bit more of it in the Assange Flipping piece - look for the keyword “puppies” to find the relevant section.
Some of these people will get roasted by Assange if he flips. Yay. Some of the others will take a victory lap. But every last one of them will then GO. THE. FUCK. AWAY.
Feeling::Saddened:
Private Lynndie England served time and she richly deserved it. Brigadier general Janis Karpinski? Just demoted. John Yoo and Donald Rumsfeld? Hello …
Franz Gayl went public after endless efforts to get the Marine Corps to get appropriate vehicles for our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Who almost got prosecuted? Franz Gayl.
John Kiriakou reported evidence of war crimes using proper methods within his chain of command. Who got prosecuted for espionage? John Kiriakou.
Cablegate contained evidence of war crimes. Who got prosecuted? Chelsea Manning. The chain of command that left an F-35 with gender dysphoria in the position she was in? Crickets.
We know Russian active measures were in effect thanks to Reality Winner, who served five years in prison. Donald Trump will again be the Republican presidential candidate this election.
Starting to see a pattern on who does something wrong, versus who gets in trouble for it?
Corruption is to our societies what cancer is to our bodies, something that should be immediately and aggressively treated. You track it to the source and end it, before it ends you. If it goes too far, your body can turn on itself, hastening your demise.
And that is where the rules based world order is right now.
Body Count:
How many of our Afghan allies died due to Assange’s reckless disclosures? How many American troops got blown to bits by IEDs because we’d lost those sources of information?
There will never be an accurate accounting, it’s just not possible, but during the last month of Donald Trump’s presidency more American died every day from COVID19 than the 2,977 who died on September 11th, 2001.
Last summer one of the NAFO Europe guys called me, worried about an American veteran who’d been part of their group. Being familiar with the process, I made the health & welfare check call. He was already dead when the police got there.
Last spring a guy I know took a break from relief duties in Ukraine, months after one of their team leaders was killed. He let friends use his apartment, survivors of the attack that killed their lead. They were asleep when the apartment took a direct hit from a Russian missile.
Conclusion:
While writing this I was going back and forth with Chet Uber on Substack. He and I met in 1997, the year before Emma’s timeline begins. Had I not agreed to help him stand up Project VIGILANT fifteen years ago last month, my life would have taken a very different course.
The hands down oddest thing across the entire span of time? Can you name three people who were members of Omaha’s Temple Israel? I can …
Chet Uber
Neal Rauhauser
Seth Rich
I’m sure I encountered a teenage Seth leaving Hebrew school as I was taking my kindergarten age son in, but I have no memory of him. Chet is five year in my senior and has no kids, so is even less likely to have ever encountered him. The heads of blithering idiots who didn’t already know this obscure but long public fact are currently spinning.
But you, constant reader, could have easily found out who was actually responsible by simply putting “DNC intrusion” into the Disinfodrome server.
We have fought long and hard, Chet and I, and every other member of the Project VIGILANT alumni association. We often disagreed about what was happening, why, and more importantly what to do about it. But looking back, there was one commonality - all of us were worried about something along the lines of the big issue we now face - November’s Civil War Referendum.
I’ve got a timeline of my own, and a literary agent who periodically pokes me. “Nice blog post, now where’s the first chapter of your book?” Whether or not that ever sees the light of day is entirely dependent on what happens this next Guy Fawkes day.