Cables Obtained by WikiLeaks Shine Light into Secret Diplomatic Channels

Pfc. Bradley Manning is accused of leaking diplomatic
cables and other classified documents to WikiLeaks. 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
intends to make the archive public on its Web site in batches,
beginning Sunday. The anticipated disclosure of the cables is
already sending shudders through the diplomatic establishment, and
could conceivably 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.”

“President
Obama supports responsible, accountable, and open government at
home and around the world, but this reckless and dangerous action
runs counter to that goal,” the statement said. “By releasing
stolen and classified documents, WikiLeaks has put at risk not only
the cause of human rights but also the lives and work of these
individuals.”

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.”

Gaming out 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.

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 enjoys
supremacy over all other public figures in Russia, he is undermined
by an unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignores 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 has withheld from articles and removed from
documents it is posting on line 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.

Terrorism’s Shadow: 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 American officials managing relations with
a China on the rise and a Russia retreating from democracy. They
document years of painstaking 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
nonetheless 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 Yemeni forces
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 to the tale a touch of scandal and
alarm. 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 Mr. Mugabe “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 of
dispatches were placed online by WikiLeaks, with selective redactions
of the Afghan documents and much heavier redactions of the Iraq
reports. The group has said it intends to post the documents in the
current trove as well, after editing to remove the names of
confidential sources and other details.

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, entitled
“Foreign Relations of the United States,” has reached only the
year 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 Teheran, 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
diplomatic cable retains the archaic name of an earlier technological
era. It has long been the tool for the secretary of state to dispatch
orders to the field and for ambassadors and political officers to
send their analyses back to Washington.

The cables come with their own lexicon: “codel,”
for a visiting 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.

Diplomatic Drama: 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 mid-narrative 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 repeatedly 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.’ ”