Julian Assange’s wife speaks of elation over plea deal

Julian’s Assange’s wife has told of her elation that the WikiLeaks founder has been released from Belmarsh prison in London and will soon be a “free man” under a deal in which he will plead guilty to violating US espionage law.

Speaking from Australia, where she flew on Sunday to prepare her family’s new life, Stella Assange, a human rights lawyer, said she had not told the couple’s two young sons, Gabriel and Max, about their father’s release after five years in jail for fear of the information leaking.

She said: “All I told them was that there was a big surprise. And, on the morning that we left, I told them where we’re heading to the airport, and we got on the plane, and I told them that we were going to visit our family, their cousin, their grandfather and so on.

“And they still don’t know. We’ve been very careful, because obviously, no one can stop a five- and a seven-year-old from, you know, shouting it from the rooftops at any given moment. Because of the sensitivity around the judge having to sign off the deal, we’ve been very careful, just gradually, incrementally telling them information.”

Assange, 52, was woken at 2am in his cell in Belmarsh on Monday before being handcuffed and transported to Stansted airport to take a chartered jet via Bangkok to the island of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, which is US territory.

There, he is due to plead guilty on Wednesday to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents, according to filings in the island’s district court.

Under the deal with the US justice department, he will be free to leave the court due to time already served and to travel on to Australia to be reunited with his family.

Related: ‘It’s been a hard journey’: Julian Assange supporters celebrate his release

Stella Assange said her husband would be “a free man once it is signed off by the judge, and that will be sometime tomorrow”.

The couple’s two children were born during a period when Assange was living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he was granted political asylum by that country’s government in 2012.

Assange was arrested in the embassy in 2019 when Ecuador withdrew his asylum and allowed UK police to enter the building.

He had been holed up in the embassy in Knightsbridge, avoiding extradition to Sweden over sexual assault allegations that Assange has always denied and which have since been dropped.

Assange was further arrested at that time, however, at the request of the US seeking his extradition over allegations he conspired with the former US military analyst Chelsea Manning to download classified databases in what the US justice department called “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States”.

Stella Assange said her husband had never seen their children outside the confines of Belmarsh.

She said: “All their interactions with Julian have been in a single visitors’ room inside Belmarsh prison. It’s always been for a little more than an hour at a time. It’s been very restrictive. You know, he can’t walk around. He can’t go to the tuck shop. He wasn’t able to go to the tuck shop and buy a chocolate or anything you see.”

Kristinn Hrafnsson, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, told the Guardian that the transport of Assange to Stansted after being woken and handcuffed at 2am on Monday had involved a “final kick by the British establishment”.

“He was brought into a transport vehicle and put in a tiny box there, where he basically sat for three hours,” Hrafnsson said of his friend’s delivery to Stansted airport in Essex, 40 miles (65km) north-east of the capital.

“There were up to 40 policemen guarding the outside. There was a helicopter hovering overhead, six police vehicles in a convoy to the airport, when they knew they were driving him basically out of the country in accordance to the agreement that has been drawn up.

“It begs the question: why on earth? What on earth did they envision? That he will abscond on his way to freedom?”

Assange had to pay $520,000 (£410,000/$A783,000) to charter a Bombardier Global 6000, a long-range business jet, to fly him from Stansted to the Northern Mariana Islands.

“It’s Australian policy that he will have to pay his own return flight so he’s had to charter a flight and so he will basically be in debt when he lands in Canberra,” Stella Assange said. “We’re going to launch an emergency fund to try to get this money so that we can pay the Australian government back for his freedom flight. It’s half a million US dollars.”

Related: From a plea deal to a 2am prison call: how Julian Assange finally gained freedom

Assange was being accompanied on the plane by Australia’s high commissioner to the UK, Stephen Smith, along with a WikiLeaks lawyer and a medic.

“Regardless of the views that people have about Julian Assange and his activities, the case has dragged on for too long, there is nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration and we want him brought home to Australia,” Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said.

In a letter to a federal judge in the district court for the Northern Mariana Islands, a senior justice department official said Assange was being sent to Saipan because of its “proximity to the defendant’s country of citizenship”.

A former US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, told CNN that Assange had “paid his dues” and that “justice has been served”.

“Critical to this was his plea of one count of espionage. I think the law enforcement community and the intelligence community wouldn’t have bought into this without that,” he said.

WikiLeaks said on X that Assange had left Belmarsh prison on Monday morning, after 1,901 days of captivity there. He had spent the time, the organisation said, “in a 2x3-metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day”.

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had lobbied for Assange’s release, tweeted: “Today, the world is a little better and less unjust.”

In an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Stella Assange, who was representing her husband as a human rights lawyer when they first began their relationship, said she could not yet comment at length on the deal agreed but that it would allow him to “walk free”.

Related: Reactions to Julian Assange plea deal differ across the US political divide

She added that the key to the development was a high court decision in May to allow Assange leave to mount a fresh appeal against his extradition to the US on charges of leaking military secrets.

Assange has struggled with health issues in recent years and his wife said she did not know what the future would look like for the couple.

She said: “We haven’t even had an opportunity to have a long conversation about this, and I think we don’t even know. The priority now is for Julian to get healthy again. He has been in a terrible state for five years.

“To just be in contact with nature, that’s what we both desire for now, and to have time to and privacy and just start this new chapter. It’s always been quite extraordinary. I’m just so emotional now, that this is finally over.”