Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 3.0

Mike Pompeo’s role in the first Trump administration as both director of the Central Intelligence Agency and US Secretary of State will be forever associated with the venom and desperation he had in targeting Julian Assange, a publisher who drove him to distraction and engendered mania. As the chief founder of WikiLeaks, Assange had regularly published troves of classified documents uncovering the messy muddles, messes and more sinister features of the US imperium.

When WikiLeaks published the CIA Vault 7 files in March 2017, disclosing a suite of hacking tools used by the organisation, Pompeo became insensible. CIA operatives had thought themselves invulnerable to such publishing revelations, unlike their wobbly counterparts in the State Department and the Pentagon. The report from the CIA’s WikiLeaks Task Force might have encouraged some of the bureaucratic boffins in government to improve: WikiLeaks had, effectively “brought to light multiple ongoing CIA failures”, a fault that enabled a CIA employee........

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