Cablegate — WikiLeaks' Diplomatic Cables Release

Overview

Diplomacy runs on two things: the things you say in public and the things you say in private. The entire architecture of international relations depends on this gap. Leaders praise each other at podiums while their diplomats send classified cables back to Washington describing those same leaders as corrupt, incompetent, or insane. Countries publicly deny military operations they are privately coordinating. Intelligence agencies spy on the allies whose ambassadors they’re hosting for dinner.

Everyone in the diplomatic world knows this. The public is not supposed to.

On November 28, 2010, WikiLeaks began publishing 251,287 classified diplomatic cables from 274 U.S. embassies and consulates. The cables — spanning more than four decades, from 1966 to February 2010 — were the unfiltered internal communications of the American diplomatic corps. They contained what American diplomats actually thought, actually observed, and actually reported to Washington, stripped of the euphemisms and platitudes of public diplomacy.

Cablegate didn’t reveal a single dramatic conspiracy. It revealed something worse: the comprehensive, systemic dishonesty of international relations. Every cable was a small truth that contradicted a public lie. Multiplied by a quarter million, they constituted the most complete portrait of American foreign policy ever made available to the public.

What the Cables Contained

Classification Levels

Of the 251,287 cables:

• 133,887 were unclassified
• 101,748 were “Confidential”
• 15,652 were “Secret”
• None were “Top Secret” (Manning did not have access to Top Secret networks)

The classification levels are significant: these were not the most sensitive U.S. intelligence products. They were the working-level communications of diplomats — assessments, observations, and instructions that collectively painted a picture of how American foreign policy actually operated.

The Revelations

The Middle East:

• Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah repeatedly urged the U.S. to “cut the head off the snake” by attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities — while publicly calling for diplomatic solutions
• The cables documented the extent of Gulf states’ private support for U.S. military action against Iran, contradicting their public positions
• Yemen’s President Saleh told General Petraeus: “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours” — acknowledging that U.S. drone strikes in Yemen were being disguised as Yemeni military operations
• Detailed accounts of corruption in Afghanistan, including reports of Vice President Ahmad Zia Massoud carrying $52 million in cash on a visit to the UAE

Europe:

• U.S. diplomats were ordered to collect biometric data on UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, other senior UN officials, and Security Council representatives — effectively spying on the international organization
• The U.S. pressured Spain to drop a criminal investigation into the deaths of a Spanish journalist and cameraman killed by U.S. forces in Iraq
• Germany was pressured to drop arrest warrants for CIA agents involved in the mistaken rendition of Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen kidnapped and tortured because he shared a name with a terror suspect
• French President Nicolas Sarkozy was described as “thin-skinned and authoritarian”; Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was characterized as “feckless, vain, and ineffective”

Russia and China:

• Vladimir Putin was described as an “alpha dog” who ran Russia through a system where “ichurches sing the Kremlin’s tune”
• The cables documented Russian organized crime links to the state and described Russia’s government as a “virtual mafia state”
• China’s Politburo was identified as directing the hacking of Google and other Western companies — an accusation China publicly denied
• North Korea was described as selling missile technology to Iran and Myanmar

Africa and Latin America:

• Tunisia’s Ben Ali regime was described in extraordinary detail as a “quasi-mafia” operation — cables that were widely read in Tunisia and contributed to the atmosphere that sparked the 2011 revolution
• Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi’s personal eccentricities were documented with remarkable candor, including his “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian nurse
• Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe was described in terms that contradicted the U.S.’s public diplomatic posture

The Spying Directives

Among the most consequential cables was a 2009 directive signed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton instructing diplomats to collect intelligence on UN officials, including:

• Biometric data (fingerprints, DNA, iris scans)
• Credit card numbers
• Email addresses and encryption keys
• Computer passwords

The directive effectively ordered diplomats to conduct intelligence operations on the international organization they were accredited to. When the cable was published, it caused a diplomatic firestorm and raised questions about the blurring of diplomatic and intelligence functions.

The Publication Process

The Media Partnership

Unlike the Collateral Murder video, which WikiLeaks released independently, Cablegate was published through a consortium of five major newspapers: The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El País. Each newspaper received the full archive and agreed to:

• Review cables before publication
• Redact information that could endanger individuals
• Publish stories based on the cables with context and analysis
• Release the underlying cables alongside their reporting

The partnership gave the release journalistic legitimacy and editorial oversight. The newspapers identified the most significant cables, provided context, and made editorial judgments about what to redact.

The Unredacted Release

The careful redaction process was undermined in September 2011 when Guardian journalist David Leigh published the encryption password for the complete cable archive in his book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. Leigh claimed Assange had told him the password was temporary. It wasn’t. The encrypted file had been circulating on BitTorrent for months.

Once the password was public, the full unredacted archive — including the names of informants, intelligence sources, and confidential contacts — was accessible to anyone. WikiLeaks then published the complete archive unredacted, arguing that since the password was already public, redaction was pointless.

The unredacted release intensified concerns about potential harm to named sources. The State Department conducted a massive review, contacting hundreds of individuals named in the cables and, in some cases, relocating them.

The Impact

The Arab Spring Connection

The cables’ impact on the Arab Spring is debated but significant. The cables describing Tunisia’s Ben Ali regime as corrupt and despotic were widely circulated in Tunisia in early 2011, shortly before the revolution that overthrew Ben Ali. The cables didn’t cause the revolution — decades of repression did — but they validated what Tunisians already knew and undermined the regime’s legitimacy by showing that even its American allies considered it irredeemable.

Similar dynamics played out in Egypt, Libya, and other Arab states where the cables’ candid assessments contradicted the public U.S. posture of supporting allied autocrats.

Diplomatic Fallout

Despite predictions of catastrophic damage to U.S. diplomacy, the actual impact was more limited than feared. Defense Secretary Robert Gates offered the most honest assessment: “The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets.”

The cables caused embarrassment but rarely fundamentally altered relationships. Countries that needed the U.S. continued working with it. Leaders who were described unflattering ways were annoyed but pragmatic. The diplomatic machine ground on.

The longer-term impact was on information security. The cables’ leak — along with the war logs — led to dramatic tightening of access to classified networks, the creation of insider threat programs, and a general culture of paranoia about information sharing within the U.S. government.

Press Freedom Implications

Cablegate established a precedent that classified diplomatic communications could be published by the press. The New York Times, Guardian, and other participating newspapers relied on First Amendment protections (in the U.S.) and press freedom laws (in Europe) to publish classified material in the public interest.

The U.S. government’s response — prosecuting the leaker (Manning) while not prosecuting the publishers — followed the pattern established by the Pentagon Papers case. But the eventual prosecution of Assange himself under the Espionage Act challenged that precedent, raising questions about whether the publisher/source distinction would hold.

Timeline

Sources & Further Reading

• Leigh, David, and Luke Harding. WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. Guardian Books, 2011.
• The Guardian. “US Embassy Cables” series, November 2010-ongoing.
• The New York Times. “State’s Secrets” series, November 2010-ongoing.
• Der Spiegel. “WikiLeaks Diplomatic Cables” coverage, November 2010.
• Gates, Robert. Statement on WikiLeaks releases, November 30, 2010.

Related Theories

• WikiLeaks — The organization behind the release
• Chelsea Manning — The source of the cables
• Collateral Murder — The Iraq war video released alongside the cables
• Julian Assange Persecution — The legal battle triggered by these releases