Cartel leaders, terrorists, and traitors will be Julian Assange’s fellow prisoners if federal prosecutors and intelligence chiefs have their way and he is incarcerated in America’s most secure facility.
Once he arrives on U.S. soil after he’s extradited, the Australian-born WikiLeaks founder, 47, is likely to a slew of charges — including espionage — that would land him in prison for life. If convicted of such serious charges, Assange would almost certainly end up at the Supermax facility known ADX Florence in Colorado, in part because intelligence officials believe he represents a grave threat to the U.S.
The United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility is home to the nation’s most infamous spies and double agents as well as foreign and domestic terrorists. Known as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies,” the Florence, Colo., maximum-security prison houses 388 male inmates whose escape is assessed as posing a serious threat to U.S. national security.
Prisoners there are under constant surveillance, kept in near-isolation, and are locked in soundproof cells for 23 hours each day.
Gun towers, razor wire, armed guards, and concrete walls ensure that once a prisoner goes in, he is cut off from the outside world. If Assange lands there, he would find himself living with a number of famous turncoats.
Several are doing time for spying for Russia. Robert Hanssen, a former FBI agent who spent the 1980s and 1990s spying for the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. Harold Nicholson, a former CIA officer recruited by Russian intelligence in the 1990s, was sentenced to decades in prison — and received an additional sentence after it was revealed he’d used his son to continue working with Russian intelligence even from behind bars.
Noshir Gowadia, who was sentenced to 30 years, was one of the engineers behind the stealth bomber and sold military secrets, including cruise missile technology, to China and others in the 2000s. Kendall Myers, a former State Department official who spied for Cuba, is serving a sentence of life without parole. When he had his wife, now freed, were convicted he told the judge: “Our overriding objective was to help the Cuban people defend their revolution. We share the ideals of the Cuban revolution.”
Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera is the Mexican drug lord who headed the Sinaloa Cartel, named after the Mexican Pacific coast state of Sinaloa where it was formed. Known as “El Chapo Guzmán” for his short stature, he became Mexico’s top drug kingpin in 2003.
Foreign terrorists include Zacarias Moussaoui, whom prosecutors tried to portray as the “20th hijacker” in the al Qaeda terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. Moussaoui is serving six life terms without parole, two more than Umar Abdulmutallab. Nicknamed the “Underwear Bomber,” Abdulmutallab is in ADX Florence for his efforts to take down an airplane on Christmas Day 2009.
Richard Reid, the British “Shoe Bomber” terrorist who tried to bring down an airline in 2001, is also there serving a life sentence.
The prison even has a cell block known as “Bombers Row,” where Pakistani terrorist Ramzi Yousef, who helped carry out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, is locked up alongside Americans such as “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, Oklahoma City bombing accomplice Terry Nichols, and Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph.
Not all of ADX Florence’s residents are there for life. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who along with his now-deceased brother Tamerlan carried out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, awaits the death penalty.
The sole charge Assange currently faces carries only a maximum penalty of five years in prison. But that charge was likely brought simply to ensure his extradition from Britain, a key U.S. ally. The Department Of Justice alleges Assange conspired with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in cracking a password stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers, which allowed Manning to access secret documents.
Manning turned over those documents to WikiLeaks, which released hundreds of thousands of classified Iraq War combat reports, Guantanamo Bay detainee briefs, and State Department cables.
Charles Stimson, who oversaw the detention of alleged terrorists during his tenure as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs in the Bush administration,, was confident that Assange would face additional counts. “I’m sure there will be superseding indictments. There’s no doubt in my mind as a prosecutor,” he said. “They might have a superseding indictment that’s sealed already.”
If Assange is only convicted on the single count, he will likely be sentenced to the full five years. A similar 2016 case centered around Justin Liverman, a hacker who conspired with hacking group Crackas With Attitude to gain unauthorized access to former CIA Director John Brennan’s electronic communications and, later, to a confidential law enforcement database.
Like Assange, Liverman didn’t do the hacking himself but encouraged it — and he got the maximum sentence of five years in 2017. Liverman’s initial indictment was sealed in the Eastern District Court of Virginia, just like Assange’s. Liverman is doing his time at Fort Dix in New Jersey.
Few prisoners are released from the Supermax. One of those who did was Travis Dusenbury, who spent 10 years inside. Recalling his experience in 2016, he said: “You’re just shut off the world. You feel it. It sinks in, this dread feeling. … It’s just the harshest place you’ve ever seen. Nothing living, not so much as a blade of grass anywhere.”
