WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange heads to Australia after U.S. plea

SAIPAN, Northern Mariana Islands (Reuters) -- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange walked free on Wednesday from a court on the U.S. Pacific island territory of Saipan after pleading guilty to violating U.S. espionage law, in a deal that allowed him to head straight home to Australia.

His release ends a 14-year legal saga in which Assange spent more than five years in a British high-security jail and seven years in asylum at the Ecuadorean embassy in London battling extradition to Sweden on sexual assault allegations and to the U.S., where he faced 18 criminal charges.

Those charges stemmed from WikiLeaks' release in 2010 of hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. military documents on Washington's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, one of the largest breaches of secret information in U.S. history.

During a three-hour hearing in Saipan, Assange pleaded guilty to one criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified national defense documents but said he had believed the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, which protects free speech, shielded his activities.

"Working as a journalist I encouraged my source to provide information that was said to be classified in order to publish that information," he told the court.

"I believed the First Amendment protected that activity but I accept that it was ... a violation of the espionage statute."

Chief U.S. District Judge Ramona V. Manglona accepted his guilty plea, noting that the U.S. government indicated there was no personal victim from Assange's actions.

She wished Assange, who turns 53 on July 3, an early happy birthday as she released him due to time already served in a British jail.

While the U.S. government viewed Assange as reckless for putting its agents at risk of harm by