WikiLeaks

by Harding, Luke

  In fact, far from being routine, the leak was unprecedented, if only in size. WikiLeaks called it, accurately, “the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain”. There were 251,287 internal state department communiqués, written by 280 embassies and consulates in 180 different countries. Among them were frank, and often unflattering, assessments of world leaders; analysis, much of it good quality; as well as comments, reports of meetings, summations, and gossip. There were accounts of vodka-fuelled dinners, meetings with oligarchs, encounters in Chinese restaurants and even that Saudi Arabian sex party. Some cables were long essays, offering fresh thinking on historically knotty problems, such as Chechnya; others simple requests to Washington.

  They highlighted the geopolitical interests and preoccupations of the US superpower: nuclear proliferation; the supposed threat from Iran; the hard-to-control military situation in Kabul and Islamabad. The American embassy cables came from established power centres (London and Paris) but also the far-off margins (Ashgabat, Yerevan and Bishkek). Boring they are not. On the contrary, they offer an incomparably detailed mosaic of life and politics in the early 21st century.

  But more importantly than this, they included disclosures of things citizens are entitled to know. This is true for Americans and non-Americans. The cables discussed human rights abuses, corruption, and dubious financial ties between G8 leaders. They spoke of corporate espionage, dirty tricks and hidden bank accounts. In their private exchanges US diplomats dispense with the platitudes that characterise much of their public job; they give relatively frank, unmediated assessments, offering a window into the mental processes at the top of US power. The cables were, in a way, the truth.

  The constant principle that underpinned the Guardian’s selection – what to print and what not – was whether a cable contained material that was in the larger public interest. Nowhere was this more clear-cut than with a classified directive from July 2009 that revealed the US government was spying on the United Nations, and its low-key South Korean secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. The cable began by requesting predictable diplomatic information about positions and views on hot topics such as Darfur, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea. But read more closely it clearly blurred the line between diplomacy and spying.

  The directive from Washington asked for sensitive communications information – passwords, encryption codes. It called for detailed biometric information “on key UN officials, to include undersecretaries, heads of specialised agencies and their chief advisers, top SYG [secretary general] aides, heads of peace operations and political field missions, including force commanders”, as well as intelligence on Ban’s “management and decision-making style and his influence on the secretariat”. Washington also wanted credit card numbers, email addresses, phone, fax and pager numbers and frequent-flyer account numbers for UN figures. It was also after “biographic and biometric information on UN security council permanent representatives”.

  The “national human intelligence collection directive” was distributed to US missions at the UN in New York, Vienna and Rome; and to 33 embassies and consulates, including those in London, Paris and Moscow. All of Washington’s main intelligence agencies – the CIA’s clandestine service, the US Secret Service and the FBI – as well as the state department, were circulated with these “reporting and collection needs”.

  The UN has long been the victim of bugging and espionage operations. Veteran diplomats are used to conducting their most sensitive discussions outside its walls, and not everyone was surprised at the disclosures. Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer in the Middle East, remarked: “There is a reason the CIA station is usually next door to the political section in our embassies. There are ambassadors who love that stuff. In the American system it sloshes over from side to side.”

  But the cable – signed “CLINTON” – illuminated a cynical spying campaign. American diplomatic staff enjoy immunity and can operate without suspicion. The British historian and Guardian columnist Timothy Garton Ash was one of many disturbed by the directive. Garton Ash remarked that “regular American diplomats are being asked to do stuff you would normally expect of low-level spooks”.

  Experts on international law were also affronted. The cable seemed to show the US breaching three of the founding treaties of the UN. Ban’s spokesman, Farhan Haq, sent off a letter reminding member states to respect the UN’s inviolability: “The UN charter, the headquarters agreement and the 1946 convention contain provisions relating to the privileges and immunities of the organisation. The UN relies on the adherence by member states to these various undertakings.”

  The American cables held numerous other secrets that it was right to disclose in the public interest. Memo after memo from US stations across the Middle East exposed widespread behind-the-scenes pressures to contain President Ahmadinejad’s Iran, which the US, Arab states and Israel believed to be close to acquiring nuclear weapons. Startlingly, the cables showed King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia urging the United States to attack Iran to destroy its nuclear programme. Other Arab allies, too, had secretly been agitating for military action against Tehran. Bombing Iranian nuclear facilities had hitherto been publicly viewed as a desperate last resort that could ignite a far wider war – one that was not seriously on anyone’s diplomatic table except possibly that of the Israelis.

  The Saudi king was recorded as having “frequently exhorted the US to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons programme”. He “told you [Americans] to cut off the head of the snake”, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, said, according to a report on Abdullah’s meeting with the US general David Petraeus in April 2008.

  The cables further highlighted Israel’s anxiety to preserve its regional nuclear monopoly, its readiness to go it alone against Iran – and its relentless attempts to influence American policy. The defence minister, Ehud Barak, claimed, for example, in June 2009, that there was a window of “between six and 18 months from now in which stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons might still be viable”. Thereafter, Barak said, “any military solution would result in unacceptable collateral damage”.

  The true scale also emerged of America’s covert military involvement in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest nation. Washington’s concern that Yemen has become a haven for Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (Aqap) was understandable. The group had carried out a series of attacks on western targets, including a failed airline cargo bomb plot in October 2010 and an attempt the previous year to bring down a US passenger jet over Detroit. Less justifiable, perhaps, was why the US agreed to a secret deal with Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to pass off US attacks on al-Qaida targets as his own.

  The cables showed Saleh gave the Americans an “open door” to conduct counter-terrorist missions in Yemen, and to launch cruise missile strikes on Yemeni territory. The first in December 2009 killed dozens of civilians along with alleged militants. Saleh presented it as Yemen’s own work, supported by US intelligence. In a meeting with Gen Petraeus, the head of US central command, Saleh admitted lying to his population about the strikes, and deceiving parliament. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours and not yours,” he told Petraeus. It was a lie the US seemed ready to condone.

  As the New York Times’s Bill Keller put it, the documents advanced our knowledge of the world not in great leaps but by small degrees. For those interested in foreign policy, they provided nuance, texture and drama. For those who followed stories less closely, they were able to learn more about international affairs in a lively way. But the cables also included a few jaw-dropping moments, when an entire curtain seemed swept aside to reveal what a country is really like.

  The most dramatic such disclosures came not from the Middle East but Russia. It is widely known that Russia – nominally under the control of President Dmitry Medvedev but in reality run by the prime minister, Vladimir Putin – is corrupt and undemocratic. But the cables went much further. They painted a bleak
and despairing picture of a kleptocracy centred on Putin’s leadership, in which officials, oligarchs and organised crime are bound together in a “virtual mafia state”.

  Arms trafficking, money laundering, personal enrichment, protection for gangsters, extortion and kickbacks, suitcases full of money and secret offshore accounts – the American embassy cables unpicked a political system in which bribery totals an estimated $300bn year, and in which it is often hard to distinguish between the activities of government and organised crime. Read together, the collection of cables offered a rare moment of truth-telling about a regime normally accorded international respectability.

  Despite the improvement in US-Russian relations since President Obama took power, the Americans are under no illusions about their Russian interlocutors. The cables stated that Russian spies use senior mafia bosses to carry out criminal operations such as arms trafficking. Law enforcement agencies, meanwhile, such as the police, spy agencies and the prosecutor’s office, run a de facto protection racket for criminal networks. Moscow’s former mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, sacked in 2010 by Medvedev for political reasons, presided over a “pyramid of corruption”, US officials suggested. (Luzkov’s billionaire wife, Yelena Baturina, dismissed the accusations as “total rubbish”.)

  Russia’s bureaucracy is so corrupt that it operates what is in effect a parallel tax system for the private enrichment of police, officials, and the KGB’s successor, the federal security service (FSB), the cables said. There have been rumours for years that Putin has personally amassed a secret fortune, hidden overseas. The cables made clear that US diplomats treat the rumours as true: they speculate that Putin deliberately picked a weak successor when he stepped down as Russian president in 2008 because he could be worried about losing his “illicit proceeds” to law enforcement investigations. In Rome, meanwhile, US diplomats relayed suspicions that the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, could be “profiting personally and handsomely” by taking a cut from clandestine energy deals with Putin.

  A particularly damning cable about Russia was sent from Madrid. Dated 8 February 2010, it fed back to Washington a briefing by a Spanish prosecutor. Jose Gonzalez spent more than a decade trying to unravel the activities of Russian organised crime in Spain. He met US officials in January and told them that Russia had become a “virtual mafia state” in which “one cannot differentiate between the activities of the government and OC [organised crime] groups.” Gonzalez said he had evidence – thousands of wiretaps have been used in the last 10 years – that certain political parties in Russia worked hand in hand with mafia gangs. He said that intelligence officers orchestrated gun shipments to Kurdish groups to destabilise Turkey and were pulling the strings behind the 2009 case of the Arctic Sea cargo ship suspected of carrying missiles destined for Iran. Gangsters enjoyed support and protection and, in effect, worked “as a complement to state structures”, he told US officials.

  Gonzalez said the disaffected Russian intelligence services officer Alexander Litvinenko secretly met Spanish security officials in May 2006, six months before he was murdered in London with radioactive polonium. Litvinenko told the Spanish that Russia’s intelligence and security services controlled the country’s organised crime network. A separate cable from Paris from December 2006 disclosed that US diplomats believed Putin was likely to have known about Litvinenko’s murder. Daniel Fried, then the most senior US diplomat in Europe, claimed it would be remarkable if Russia’s leader knew nothing about the plot given his “attention to detail”. The Russians were behaving with “increasing self-confidence to the point of arrogance”, Fried noted.

  The Guardian published WikiLeaks’ Russia disclosures on 2 December 2010, over five pages and under the striking headline: “Inside Putin’s ‘mafia state’”. The front-page photo showed Putin, a former KGB foreign intelligence officer, wearing a pair of dark glasses. For many, the Russia WikiLeaks disclosures were the most vivid to emerge. Janine Gibson, the Guardian’s website editor, was struck by the online response: “The Russia day was brilliant and hugely well read. It was the best day. We were able to say everything you might want to say, but you could never previously say because everybody is so terrified. It was an extraordinary thing.” She went on: “You can tell what the internet thinks about things. You could tell what everyone thought. There was an enormous sense of, ‘Ah-hah!’”

  (Across the Atlantic, however, as though determined to cement its reputation for understatement, the New York Times published the same material under a studiedly diffident headline: “In cables, US takes a dim view of Russia”. The contrast between US and British journalistic practices could give future media studies students much to ponder.)

  Undoubtedly, the cables showed the dysfunctional nature of the modern Russian state. But they also showcased the state department’s literary strengths. Among many fine writers in the US foreign service, William Burns – Washington’s ambassador to Moscow and now its top diplomat – emerged as the most gifted. Burns has a Rolls-Royce mind. His dispatches on diverse subjects such as Stalin or Solzhenitsyn are gripping, precise and nuanced, combining far-reaching analysis with historical depth. Were it not for the fact that they were supposed to be secret, his musings might have earned him a Pulitzer prize.

  In one glorious dispatch Burns described how Chechnya’s ruler Ramzan Kadyrov was the star guest at a raucous Dagestani wedding and “danced clumsily with his gold-plated automatic stuck down the back of his jeans”. During the “lavish” reception Kadyrov showered dancers with $100 notes and gave the happy couple an unusual wedding present – “a five kilo lump of gold”. The ambassador was one of more than 1,000 guests invited to the wedding in Dagestan of the son of the local politician and powerful oil chief Gadzhi Makhachev.

  Burns went to dinner at Gadzhi’s “enormous summer house on the balmy shores of the Caspian Sea”. The cast of guests he describes is almost worthy of Evelyn Waugh. They included a Chechen commander (later assassinated), sports and cultural celebrities, “wizened brown peasants”, a nanophysicist, “a drunken wrestler” called Vakha and a first-rank submarine captain. Some were slick, he noted, but others “Jurassic”.

  “Most of the tables were set with the usual dishes plus whole roast sturgeons and sheep. But at 8pm the compound was invaded by dozens of heavily armed mujahideen for the grand entrance of the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, looking shorter and less muscular than his photos, and with a somewhat cock-eyed expression on his face.” Kadyrov and his retinue sat at the tables eating and listening to “Benya the Accordion King”, Burns reported. There was a fireworks display followed by lezginka – a traditional Caucasus dance performed by two girls and three small boys. “First Gadzhi joined them and then Ramzan … Both Gadzhi and Ramzan showered the children with $100 bills; the dancers probably picked upwards of $5,000 off the cobblestones.”

  This was entertaining and telling stuff, about a region – the north Caucasus – that had fallen off the world’s radar. It was reportage of the best kind.

  But there were also disclosures from other troublesome areas that had long been of concern in Washington. Far from being firm, natural allies, for example, as many people had assumed, China had an astonishingly fractious relationship with North Korea. Beijing had even signalled its readiness to accept Korean reunification and was privately distancing itself from the North Korean regime, the cables showed. The Chinese were no longer willing to offer support for Kim Jong-il’s bizarre dictatorship, it seemed.

  China’s emerging position was revealed in sensitive discussions between Kathleen Stephens, the US ambassador to Seoul, and South Korea’s vice foreign minister, Chun Yung-woo. Citing two high-ranking Chinese officials, Chun told the ambassador that younger-generation Chinese Communist Party leaders no longer regarded North Korea as a useful or reliable ally. Moreover, they would not risk renewed armed conflict on the peninsula, he stated. The cable read: “The two officials, Chun said, were ready to ‘face the new reality’ th
at the DPRK [North Korea] now had little value to China as a buffer state – a view that, since North Korea’s first nuclear test in 2006, had reportedly gained traction among senior PRC [People’s Republic of China] leaders.”

  It is astonishing to hear the Chinese position described in this way. Envisaging North Korea’s collapse, the cable said, “the PRC would be comfortable with a reunified Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the United States in a ‘benign alliance’ – as long as Korea was not hostile towards China.” The Chinese, in short, were fed up with their troublesome North Korean neighbours. In April 2009 Pyongyang blasted a three-stage rocket over Japan and into the Pacific in an act of pure belligerence. China’s vice foreign minister He Yafei was unimpressed. He told US embassy officials that the North Koreans were behaving like a “spoiled child” to get Washington’s attention. This was all new.

  The cables also disclosed, ominously for the internet future, that Google had been forced to withdraw from mainland China merely because of an unfortunate piece of bad luck. A senior member of the Communist Party used the search engine to look for his own name. He was unhappy with what he found: several articles criticising him personally. As a result Google was forced to drop a link from its Chinese-language search engine to its uncensored Google.com page and – as the cable put it – “walk away from a potential market of 400 million internet users”.

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  As far as the UK was concerned, the cables made distinctly uncomfortable reading. Educated Americans frequently regard Britain’s royal family with amused disdain, as a Ruritanian throwback. Rob Evans of the Guardian realised that, and had rapidly discovered a pen portrait which shed painful light on Prince Andrew, one of the Queen’s sons. Andrew, who was regularly flown around the world at the British taxpayers’ expense as a “special trade representative”, was the subject of an acid cable back to Washington from faraway Kyrgyzstan. He emerged as rude, blustering, guffawing about local bribery, and – to the shocked delight of reporters at the Guardian – highly offensive about their own newspaper’s exposures of corruption. The US ambassador quoted him denouncing “these (expletive) reporters, especially from the National [sic] Guardian, who poke their noses everywhere’ and (presumably) make it harder for British businessmen to do business.”