By the end of April, police had arrested a Spanish journalist named Jose “Pepe” Martín, along with several other alleged accomplices, on suspicion of belonging to a criminal organization, and attempted extortion. Martín told police he received the vast cache of surveillance footage of Assange in an anonymous package in the mail in October 2018. When I spoke to him in July, he told me a different version, saying he landed the files through unspecified contacts, though he declined to give further details.

The footage, according to WikiLeaks, was taken directly from security cameras installed in the embassy, which around the time Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno took office in May 2017 had been refitted to allow for recording audio as well as video.

“I identified with Assange because I’m also the typical journalist who goes after big scoops and wants to fight power.”

When we spoke this past summer, Martín, 54, was bullish but talkative, frequently threatening legal action against those he claimed had wronged him. There’s little trace of Martín’s journalistic career online, but over the course of several weeks of calls he sent me a YouTube clip of him as a newscaster, recounting his take on current events in front of a low-quality green screen. Picture a litigious conservative talk show host working on a tight budget. (Court documents shared with me also show that Martín was sentenced almost a decade earlier to three years in prison for attempting to defraud an elderly couple and their insurance company)

Martín told me he saw the Assange footage as a big scoop. He had hoped to get the files published and land a world exclusive, and also wanted to expose what he saw as wrongdoing against Assange. “I identified with Assange because I’m also the typical journalist who goes after big scoops and wants to fight power,” he later told me.

But things got off to a poor start. Many publications were wary of becoming embroiled in an international dispute, Martín said, and had trouble believing his story. “They thought we were crazy,” he told me. It was time to try something else.

In March this year, Martín began negotiating with WikiLeaks directly, eventually asking for 3 million euros for the files, according to emails Hrafnsson later showed to the press. For WikiLeaks, it was a confusing negotiation. Some of the material Martín sent to prove he had the files suggested professional surveillance, leaving Hraffnsson to openly wonder whether the Martín and his colleagues were working with the Ecuadorian intelligence service. One image showed a legal document left briefly unattended in the embassy by one of Assange’s lawyers. In the corner of the image, a thumb is visible, apparently belonging to whomever covertly photographed the files.

But other clues pointed to a much more amateur operation. Besides briefly employing the pseudonym “Ismael Montgomery” on Twitter when offering to sell the footage, Martín took few precautions, using an easily traceable email address from his previous publication and his mom’s phone to contact WikiLeaks.

Hrafnsson flew to Madrid to discuss the leaked material. On the morning of April 2, Hrafnsson and a translator met Martín and two associates at a hotel in central Madrid. Martín brought a laptop. Over several hours, he showed Hrafnsson many of the thousands of files they had. Immediately after the meeting, Hrafnsson went to the police. He showed them the photos sent to him by Martín, who Hrafnsson said was extorting WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

Negotiations continued for some days after, with Hrafnsson recording conversations and gathering evidence he later passed to the police. When Hrafnsson announced the alleged extortion attempt a few days later at the press conference in London, he accused the Ecuadorian government of masterminding the spying operation. The material collected had probably been shared with the Trump administration, he told reporters, and was likely part of a campaign to have Assange extradited to the U.S.

Within hours, President Moreno rescinded diplomatic protection of Assange, and he was arrested by London’s Metropolitan Police. Assange’s time in the Ecuadorian embassy ended in apparently the same way it had begun years before: with a data leak.