About the Documents
A mammoth cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the last three years, provides an unprecedented look at bargaining by embassies, candid views of foreign leaders and assessments of threats. The material was obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to a number of news organizations in advance.
A cache of a
quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the
past three years, provides an unprecedented look at back-room bargaining by
embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders and frank
assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.
Some of
the cables, made available to The New York Times and several other news
organizations, were written as recently as late February, revealing the Obama
administration’s exchanges over crises and conflicts. The material was
originally obtained by WikiLeaks,
an organization devoted to revealing secret documents. WikiLeaks posted 220
cables, some redacted to protect diplomatic sources, in the first installment
of the archive on its Web site on Sunday.
The
disclosure of the cables is sending shudders through the diplomatic
establishment, and could strain relations with some countries, influencing
international affairs in ways that are impossible to predict.
Secretary
of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton and American ambassadors around the world have
been contacting foreign officials in recent days to alert them to the expected
disclosures. A statement
from the White House on Sunday said: “We condemn in the
strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and
sensitive national security information.”
The White
House said the release of what it called “stolen cables” to several
publications was a “reckless and dangerous action” and warned that some cables,
if released in full, could disrupt American operations abroad and put the work
and even lives of confidential sources of American diplomats at risk. The
statement noted that reports often include “candid and often incomplete
information” whose disclosure could “deeply impact not only U.S. foreign policy
interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world.”
The
cables, a huge sampling of the daily traffic between the State Department and
some 270 embassies and consulates, amount to a secret chronicle of the United
States’ relations with the world in an age of war and terrorism. Among their
revelations, to be detailed in The Times in coming days:
A
dangerous standoff with Pakistan over nuclear fuel: Since 2007, the United
States has mounted a highly secret effort, so far unsuccessful, to remove from
a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials
fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device. In May 2009,
Ambassador Anne W. Patterson reported that Pakistan was refusing to schedule a
visit by American technical experts because, as a Pakistani official said, “if
the local media got word of the fuel removal, ‘they certainly would portray it
as the United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,’ he argued.”
Thinking
about an eventual collapse of North Korea: American and South Korean officials
have discussed the prospects for a unified Korea, should the North’s economic
troubles and political transition lead the state to implode. The South Koreans
even considered commercial inducements to China, according to the American
ambassador to Seoul. She told Washington in February that South Korean
officials believe that the right business deals would “help salve” China’s
“concerns about living with a reunified Korea” that is in a “benign alliance”
with the United States.
Bargaining
to empty the Guantánamo Bay prison: When American diplomats pressed other
countries to resettle detainees, they became reluctant players in a State
Department version of “Let’s Make a Deal.” Slovenia was told to take a prisoner
if it wanted to meet with President
Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives
worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim detainees, cables from
diplomats recounted. The Americans, meanwhile, suggested that accepting more
prisoners would be “a low-cost way for Belgium to attain prominence in Europe.”
Suspicions
of corruption in the Afghan government: When Afghanistan’s vice president
visited the United Arab Emirates last year, local authorities working with the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered
that he was carrying $52 million in cash. With wry understatement, a cable from
the American Embassy in Kabul called the money “a significant amount” that the
official, Ahmed Zia Massoud, “was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing
the money’s origin or destination.” (Mr. Massoud denies taking any money out of
Afghanistan.)
A global
computer hacking effort: China’s Politburo directed the intrusion into Google’s
computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy
in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking was part of a
coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives,
private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese
government. They have broken into American government computers and those of
Western allies, the Dalai Lama and
American businesses since 2002, cables said.
Mixed records against
terrorism: Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups
like Al Qaeda,
and the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar, a generous host to the American
military for years, was the “worst in the region” in counterterrorism efforts,
according to a State Department cable last December. Qatar’s security service
was “hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for appearing to
be aligned with the U.S. and provoking reprisals,” the cable said.
An intriguing alliance:
American diplomats in Rome reported in 2009 on what their Italian contacts
described as an extraordinarily close relationship between Vladimir
V. Putin, the Russian prime minister, and Silvio
Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister and business magnate,
including “lavish gifts,” lucrative energy contracts and a “shadowy”
Russian-speaking Italian go-between. They wrote that Mr. Berlusconi “appears
increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin” in Europe. The diplomats also noted
that while Mr. Putin enjoyed supremacy over all other public figures in Russia,
he was undermined by an unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignored his edicts.
Arms
deliveries to militants: Cables describe the United States’ failing struggle to
prevent Syria from supplying arms to Hezbollah in
Lebanon, which has amassed a huge stockpile since its 2006 war with Israel. One
week after President Bashar
al-Assad promised a top State Department official that he would
not send “new” arms to Hezbollah, the United States complained that it had
information that Syria was providing increasingly sophisticated weapons to the
group.
Clashes
with Europe over human rights: American officials sharply warned Germany in
2007 not to enforce arrest warrants for Central Intelligence Agency officers
involved in a bungled operation in which an innocent German citizen with the
same name as a suspected militant was mistakenly kidnapped and held for months
in Afghanistan. A senior American diplomat told a German official “that our
intention was not to threaten Germany, but rather to urge that the German
government weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for
relations with the U.S.”
The
251,287 cables, first acquired by WikiLeaks, were provided to The Times by an
intermediary on the condition of anonymity. Many are unclassified, and none are
marked “top secret,” the government’s most secure communications status. But
some 11,000 are classified “secret,” 9,000 are labeled “noforn,” shorthand for
material considered too delicate to be shared with any foreign government, and
4,000 are designated both secret and noforn.
Many more
cables name diplomats’ confidential sources, from foreign legislators and
military officers to human rights activists and journalists, often with a
warning to Washington: “Please protect” or “Strictly protect.”
The
Times, after consultations with the State Department, has withheld from
articles and removed from documents it is posting online the names of some
people who spoke privately to diplomats and might be at risk if they were
publicly identified. The Times is also withholding some passages or entire
cables whose disclosure could compromise American intelligence efforts. While
the White House said it anticipated WikiLeaks would make public “several
hundred thousand” cables Sunday night, the organization posted only 220
released and redacted by The Times and several European publications.
The
cables show that nearly a decade after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the dark
shadow of terrorism still dominates the United States’ relations with the
world. They depict the Obama administration struggling to sort out which
Pakistanis are trustworthy partners against Al Qaeda, adding Australians who
have disappeared in the Middle East to terrorist watch lists, and assessing
whether a lurking rickshaw driver in Lahore, Pakistan, was awaiting fares or
conducting surveillance of the road to the American Consulate.
They show
officials managing relations with a China on the rise and a Russia retreating
from democracy. They document years of effort to prevent Iran from building a
nuclear weapon — and of worry about a possible Israeli strike on Iran with the
same goal.
Even when
they recount events that are already known, the cables offer remarkable
details.
For
instance, it has been previously reported that the Yemeni government has sought
to cover up the American role in missile strikes against the local branch of Al
Qaeda. But a cable’s fly-on-the-wall account of a January meeting between the
Yemeni president, Ali
Abdullah Saleh, and Gen. David
H. Petraeus, then the American commander in the Middle East, is
breathtaking.
“We’ll
continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Mr. Saleh said, according to
the cable sent by the American ambassador, prompting Yemen’s deputy prime
minister to “joke that he had just ‘lied’ by telling Parliament” that Yemen had
carried out the strikes.
Mr.
Saleh, who at other times resisted American counterterrorism requests, was in a
lighthearted mood. The authoritarian ruler of a conservative Muslim country,
Mr. Saleh complains of smuggling from nearby Djibouti, but tells General
Petraeus that his concerns are drugs and weapons, not whiskey, “provided it’s
good whiskey.”
Likewise, press reports
detailed the unhappiness of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar
el-Qaddafi, when he was not permitted to set up his tent in
Manhattan or to visit ground zero during a United
Nations session last year.
But the cables add a touch
of scandal and alarm to the tale. They describe the volatile Libyan leader as
rarely without the companionship of “his senior Ukrainian nurse,” described as
“a voluptuous blonde.” They reveal that Colonel Qaddafi was so upset by his
reception in New York that he balked at carrying out a promise to return
dangerous enriched uranium to Russia. The American ambassador to Libya told
Colonel Qaddafi’s son “that the Libyan government had chosen a very dangerous
venue to express its pique,” a cable reported to Washington.
The
cables also disclose frank comments behind closed doors. Dispatches from early
this year, for instance, quote the aging monarch of Saudi Arabia, King
Abdullah, as speaking scathingly about the leaders of Iraq and Pakistan.
Speaking
to another Iraqi official about Nuri
Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, King Abdullah said, “You
and Iraq are in my heart, but that man is not.” The king called President Asif
Ali Zardari of Pakistan the greatest obstacle to that country’s
progress. “When the head is rotten,” he said, “it affects the whole body.”
The
American ambassador to Eritrea reported last year that “Eritrean officials are
ignorant or lying” in denying that they were supporting the Shabab,
a militant Islamist group in Somalia. The cable then mused about which seemed
more likely.
As he
left Zimbabwe in 2007 after three years as ambassador, Christopher W. Dell
wrote a sardonic account of Robert
Mugabe, that country’s aging and erratic leader. The cable called
him “a brilliant tactician” but mocked “his deep ignorance on economic issues
(coupled with the belief that his 18 doctorates give him the authority to
suspend the laws of economics).”
The
possibility that a large number of diplomatic cables might become public has
been discussed in government and media circles since May. That was when, in an
online chat, an Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley
Manning, described having downloaded from a military computer system
many classified documents, including “260,000 State Department cables from
embassies and consulates all over the world.” In an online discussion with
Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker, Private Manning said he had delivered the
cables and other documents to WikiLeaks.
Mr. Lamo
reported Private Manning’s disclosures to federal authorities, and Private
Manning was arrested. He has been charged with illegally leaking classified
information and faces a possible court-martial and, if convicted, a lengthy
prison term.
In July
and October, The Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German
magazine Der Spiegel published articles based on documents about Afghanistan
and Iraq. Those collections were placed online by WikiLeaks, with selective
redactions of the Afghan documents and much heavier redactions of the Iraq
reports.
Fodder
for Historians
Traditionally,
most diplomatic cables remain secret for decades, providing fodder for
historians only when the participants are long retired or dead. The State
Department’s unclassified history series, titled “Foreign Relations of the
United States,” has reached only 1972.
While an
overwhelming majority of the quarter-million cables provided to The Times are
from the post-9/11 era, several hundred date from 1966 to the 1990s. Some show
diplomats struggling to make sense of major events whose future course they
could not guess.
In a 1979
cable to Washington, Bruce Laingen, an American diplomat in Tehran, mused with
a knowing tone about the Iranian revolution that had just occurred: “Perhaps
the single dominant aspect of the Persian psyche is an overriding egoism,” Mr.
Laingen wrote, offering tips on exploiting this psyche in negotiations with the
new government. Less than three months later, Mr. Laingen and his colleagues
would be taken hostage by radical Iranian students, hurling the Carter
administration into crisis and, perhaps, demonstrating the hazards of
diplomatic hubris.
In 1989,
an American diplomat in Panama City mulled over the options open to Gen.Manuel
Noriega, the Panamanian leader, who was facing narcotics charges in
the United States and intense domestic and international political pressure to
step down. The cable called General Noriega “a master of survival”; its author
appeared to have no inkling that one week later, the United States would invade
Panama to unseat General Noriega and arrest him.
In 1990,
an American diplomat sent an excited dispatch from Cape Town: he had just
learned from a lawyer for Nelson
Mandela that Mr. Mandela’s 27-year imprisonment was to end. The
cable conveys the momentous changes about to begin for South Africa, even as it
discusses preparations for an impending visit from the Rev. Jesse
L. Jackson.
The voluminous traffic of
more recent years — well over half of the quarter-million cables date from 2007
or later — show American officials struggling with events whose outcomes are
far from sure. To read through them is to become a global voyeur, immersed in
the jawboning, inducements and penalties the United States wields in trying to have
its way with a recalcitrant world.
In an era of satellites and
fiber-optic links, the cable retains the archaic name of an earlier
technological era. It has long been the tool for the secretary of state to send
orders to the field and for ambassadors and political officers to send their
analyses to Washington.
The
cables have their own lexicon: “codel,” for a Congressional delegation; “visas
viper,” for a report on a person considered dangerous; “démarche,” an official
message to a foreign government, often a protest or warning.
But the
drama in the cables often comes from diplomats’ narratives of meetings with
foreign figures, games of diplomatic poker in which each side is sizing up the
other and neither is showing all its cards.
Among the
most fascinating examples recount American officials’ meetings in September
2009 and February 2010 with Ahmed
Wali Karzai, the half brother of the Afghan president and a power
broker in the Taliban’s
home turf of Kandahar.
They
describe Mr. Karzai, “dressed in a crisp white shalwar kameez,” the traditional
dress of loose tunic and trousers, appearing “nervous, though eager to express
his views on the international presence in Kandahar,” and trying to win over
the Americans with nostalgic tales about his years running a Chicago restaurant
near Wrigley Field.
But in
midnarrative there is a stark alert for anyone reading the cable in Washington:
“Note: While we must deal with AWK as the head of the Provincial Council, he is
widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker.” (Mr. Karzai has
denied such charges.) And the cables note statements by Mr. Karzai that the
Americans, informed by a steady flow of eavesdropping and agents’ reports,
believe to be false.
A cable
written after the February meeting coolly took note of the deceit on both
sides.
Mr.
Karzai “demonstrated that he will dissemble when it suits his needs,” the cable
said. “He appears not to understand the level of our knowledge of his
activities. We will need to monitor his activity closely, and deliver a
recurring, transparent message to him” about the limits of American tolerance.
Not All
Business
Even in
places far from war zones and international crises, where the stakes for the
United States are not as high, curious diplomats can turn out to be
accomplished reporters, sending vivid dispatches to deepen the government’s
understanding of exotic places.
In a 2006
account, a wide-eyed American diplomat describes the lavish wedding of a
well-connected couple in Dagestan, in Russia’s Caucasus, where one guest is the
strongman who runs the war-ravaged Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan
Kadyrov.
The
diplomat tells of drunken guests throwing $100 bills at child dancers, and
nighttime water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea.
“The
dancers probably picked upwards of USD 5000 off the cobblestones,” the diplomat
wrote. The host later tells him that Ramzan Kadyrov “had brought the happy
couple ‘a five-kilo lump of gold’ as his wedding present.”
“After the dancing and a
quick tour of the premises, Ramzan and his army drove off back to Chechnya,”
the diplomat reported to Washington. “We asked why Ramzan did not spend the
night in Makhachkala, and were told, ‘Ramzan never spends the night
anywhere.’ ”
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