The guilty plea by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange brings a stunning conclusion to an international saga of the quixotic hacker who exposed government secrets.

The deal reached with the U.S. Justice Department came after Assange spent 12 years either in self-exile or a British prison.

He pleaded guilty to conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information relating to the national defense of the United States. The deal required him to admit guilt but also permitted him to return to Australia without any time in an American prison.

A look at Assange, the case and the latest developments:

Who is Julian Assange?

An Australian editor and publisher, he is best known for having founded the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, which gained massive attention - and notoriety - for the 2010 release of almost half a million documents relating to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His activism made him a cause célèbre among press freedom advocates who said his work in exposing U.S. military misconduct in foreign countries made his activities indistinguishable from what traditional journalists are expected to do as part of their jobs.

But those same actions put him in the crosshairs of American prosecutors, who released an indictment in 2019 that accused Assange - holed up at the time in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London - of conspiring with an Army private to illegally obtain and publish sensitive government records.

"Julian Assange is no journalist," John Demers, the then-top Justice Department national security official, said at the time. "No responsible actor, journalist or otherwise, would purposely publish the names of individuals he or she knew to be confidential human sources in war zones, exposing them to the gravest of dangers."

What is WikiLeaks?

Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006 as a place to post confidential documents exposing corruption and revealing secret government workings behind warfare and spying.

It has gone well beyond that, though, in publishing everything from Church of Scientology records to Sarah Palin's emails to a membership list of the far-right British National Party.

It released more than 570,000 pages of messages sent on Sept. 11, 2001, that showed users frantically trying to reach loved ones near the World Trade Center or warning them not to go downtown after hijacked jets struck the towers.

In 2008, a federal judge in San Francisco briefly shuttered the site after a Swiss bank accused it of posting stolen account information. The judge reversed the decision just over a week later after protests by free-speech advocates and news media organizations.

The site - and Assange - became best known in 2010 with the release of the classified U.S. military information, including chilling footage from an Apache helicopter showing people being gunned down in Baghdad as American airmen can be heard laughing about the "dead bastards." Two Reuters journalists were among the dead and the wounded included children.

What is Assange accused of?

The Trump administration's Justice Department accused Assange of directing former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in one of the largest compromises of classified information in U.S. history.

The charges relate to WikiLeaks' publication of thousands of leaked military and diplomatic documents, with prosecutors accusing Assange of helping Manning steal classified diplomatic cables that they say endangered national security and of conspiring together to crack a Defense Department password.

Reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq published by Assange included the names of Afghans and Iraqis who provided information to American and coalition forces, prosecutors said, while the diplomatic cables he released exposed journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates and dissidents in repressive countries.

Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison after being convicted of violating the Espionage Act and other offenses for leaking classified government and military documents to WikiLeaks. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017, allowing her release after about seven years behind bars.

From The Associated Press