WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange pleaded guilty to obtaining and publishing US military secrets in a deal with US Justice Department prosecutors that secured his freedom.

The criminal case of international intrigue, which had played out for years in major world stages of Washington and London, came to an ending in a most unusual setting with Assange entering his plea on in federal court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands.

The American commonwealth in the Pacific is relatively close to  Assange’s native Australia and accommodated his desire to avoid entering the continental United States.

As per a report by The AP, the deal required Assange to admit guilt to a single felony count but also permitted him to return to Australia without any time in an American prison.

The judge sentenced him to the five years he’d already spent behind bars in the UK, fighting extradition to the US on an Espionage Act indictment that could have carried a lengthy prison sentence in the event of a conviction. He was holed up for seven years before that in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

The criminal case brought by the Trump administration Justice Department centers on the receipt and publication of hundreds of thousands of war logs and diplomatic cables that included details of U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Prosecutors alleged that he teamed with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to obtain the records, including by conspiring to crack a Defense Department computer password, and published them without regard to American national security. Names of human sources who provided information to U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan were among the details exposed, prosecutors have said.