After 7 long years, Assange's capture happened quickly

Huddled at a home in Ecuador's capital, President Lenin Moreno's aides anxiously awaited word in the middle of the night on an operation that would soon make headlines around the world: the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange inside the country's London embassy.

Over the course of nearly seven years, the Australian hacker had all but worn out his welcome at the embassy with antics that included late-night skateboarding, harassing the staff and smearing his feces on the walls, according to Ecuadorian officials.

Moreno had finally decided to kick Assange out after getting wind of a WikiLeaks plot to blackmail him by publishing compromising documents, according to a senior government official who wasn't authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity. An incensed Moreno gave British authorities 36 hours to execute the raid Assange's critics had long been demanding.

Now, the president's aides looked nervously at their watches. Most of Ecuador, including Moreno himself, was asleep. As Moreno's 4 a.m. deadline approached, they heard nothing.

"We were waiting and waiting and thought, 'Wow, something's wrong,'" said the official. "Then we got the call."

Assange had been dragged without incident from the embassy to face hacking charges in the U.S.

"We've ended the asylum of this spoiled brat," Moreno crowed later in the day Thursday in a fiery speech.

The move to extract one of the world's most high-profile fugitives came about relatively quickly after years of what officials portrayed as obnoxious and ungracious behavior by their houseguest.

Moreno, a 66-year-old who uses a wheelchair after being shot and paralyzed from the waist down in a 1998 robbery, is usually a jovial figure. But the still-under-investigation blackmail plot marked one more in...