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251,287
LEAKED CABLES:
Monday, November 29, 2010
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This disclosure is not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community, the alliances and partnerships, the conversations and negotiations that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity.
—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
November 30, 2010
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AT 6:30 A.M. ON MONDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2010, THE political officer at the U.S. embassy in Prague spun the dial for the third time, frustration at a maximum. The clunky steel Mosler safe contained her computer hard drive, without which there would be no cable writing. The tech team had reset the combination lock and she struggled to remember the new sequence.
She was anxious to record her impressions from a recent reception. At this still-dark hour, no one else had yet arrived who might help. Writing a classified cable on her laptop and then transferring it onto the classified system was a security violation. So were several other workarounds she could think of.
To get to the safe, she had already passed several checkpoints, beginning at the chancery entrance and post one, where a friendly new marine waved her in. She crossed the cobblestoned courtyard, long since accustomed to the oddly spaced stairs, designed for horses centuries ago when the building served as a palace. She coded in the cypher lock and climbed the elegant carpeted staircase, feeling a blast of welcome heat. At the landing, she took out her cell phone, forbidden beyond this point, and slid it into a cubby opposite rows of photos, mostly black and white, of former ambassadors, among them the mysteriously named Outerbridge Horsey. She punched in the second-floor code, crossed the foyer, and entered a third code to open the door to the political-economic section. Still ahead of her were a series of log-ons and passwords, and she made a mental note to forward calls from her cell phone in the cubby so they would roll over to her desk phone. But she still needed to retrieve her hard drive.
She gave the safe an unproductive kick. The collection of scuff marks near the bottom attested to a long history of officers in a hurry. She looked blankly at the dial, hoping for inspiration.
This was the state of embassy security in late November 2010. Foreign service officers sat through mandatory security seminars in Washington before being dispatched to the field. Once they arrived at their embassy, they were briefed again by the regional security officer, given badges to be worn at all times, and granted access—or not, depending on clearance level— to other restricted-access areas such as the DIA and CIA offices and the all-important SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility), a room within a room and site of country team meetings, where the ambassador meets with senior officers and section heads from the many different U.S. government agencies that constitute an embassy. Large embassies may house representatives of more than two dozen agencies in addition to the State Department. Officers filled out clearance updates every five years and routinely sat with diplomatic security agents popping in to ask the usual questions about a colleague from a previous post who was up for security clearance renewal. Any unusual behavior—drugs, alcohol, financial problems?
For years the milder security infractions had meant little, but by 2010 the State Department had changed. Woe betide the officer who left a classified document on his desk. Once the safes were locked for the night, officers flipped wooden in-boxes upside down and topped them with tent cards that read NO CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS! Marine security guards, whose mission at embassies is to protect such documents, patrolled determinedly in the dead of night looking for security violations. Unlucky officers who left a classified document out overnight arrived the following morning to find a dreaded pink form. Absolution required a meeting with the deputy chief of mission (DCM) and a lot of contrition. The State Department was now noting violations on an officer’s permanent record, and too many incidents might bar a promotion, a coveted DCM assignment, or even an ambassadorship.
The political officer stood back, looked at the ceiling, and tried to clear her mind. She gave the dial one last try, pulled the steel lever, and heard the heavy ka-dunk that sounds the same at every post. The drawer screeched open, and she grabbed the hard drive. At last, her day could begin.
But on that morning, she wouldn’t write her cable. The WikiLeaks scandal had broken the day before, stunning not only Washington, DC, but embassies, consulates, and other U.S. diplomatic installations. The impact was so profound that foreign service officers the world over were wondering how they would ever write—or be allowed to write—cables again. Could they ensure that confidential information never fell into the wrong hands? How could they perform what they considered to be the most important part of their jobs—providing subtext, context, and details that Washington policymakers would have no other way of knowing? On that Monday morning, nothing was clear.
The irony was not lost on the officers. All the cypher locks, combinations, steel safes, and marines were not enough to prevent the theft from within of a staggering number of cables—251,287, to be exact. In one of the more surreal elements of the breach, officers were forbidden from clicking on the WikiLeaks website, because the U.S. government insisted that the material (which the officers themselves had written) was now stolen property and still classified. Protests that foreign journalists and governments were voraciously reading the cables made no difference.
That Monday, officers huddled at every embassy around the world, trying to make sense of what had happened, to assess the damage, and to think what to do next. A culture with deep respect for protecting data and sources had suddenly blown wide open, revealing for all the world the careful, sometimes humorous, sometimes shocking details written for the tiniest of audiences.
CABLE LORE
The stolen cables had a long pedigree. Letters, early telegrams, and cables run like a seam through more than 235 years of American diplomacy. In the external world of England’s Whitehall, France’s Quai d’Orsay, and scores of other foreign ministries, diplomats attend meetings, present their government’s position, and carefully negotiate. In their internal world, they try to make sense of what they see and hear for themselves and convey it to Washington through the quieter and more introspective act of writing telegrams for the official record.
Telegrams are old-fashioned, but irresistible. They serve a well-worn function in literature, largely because they are reserved for life’s most important events. In period dramas, the arrival of the telegraph boy on his bicycle triggers suspense. Will it be news of a death, announce a visitor’s unexpected arrival, or provide the vital clue to a murder mystery? An actor has only to open the envelope to transport the audience.
When telegrams are clothed in diplomatic lore, they become the game changers in power plays and secret plots. Diplomatic dispatches, a phrase that summons images of the British Empire and frantic messages from colonial outposts, bespeak a time when communications were not instantaneous but perhaps more considered. Secrecy was an essential part of the process, and writing and reading were time-consuming chores involving ciphers, codes, and transcriptions. This secrecy feeds notions of diplomacy as a world of elegance on the surface—with subtlety and calculation swirling underneath.
American diplomats have been writing home since colonial times, starting with America’s first diplomat, Benjamin Franklin, who spent nine years in France (1776–1785) before being succeeded by Thomas Jefferson. Their missions—to get military help against the British and to obtain recognition as an independent nation, respectively—were not so different from the upstart states of today. Franklin, who never planned to stay for nine years, performed the job remarkably, and with notoriously poor French. Jefferson, who served in Paris from 1784 to 1789, seemed to enjoy it more before returning home to become the first U.S. secretary of state in 1790. The correspondence of these two men, which predates the advent of the telegram, forms the bedrock of American diplomatic history.
American diplomats also have been known for not writing home. Jefferson, by then president, became exasperated with one of his uncommunicative diplomats, and in a famous line that leaves harried modern diplomats longing for the good old days, wrote, “We have not heard from our Ambassador in Spain for two years. If we do not hear from him this year, let us write him a letter.” 1 Jefferson had cause for concern. He was caught up in the Louisiana Purchase and had need of Ambassador Charles Pinckney’s help to secure the deal.
No one would be allowed to be so dilatory as Pinckney ever again. The advent of the telegraph had, by the 1860s, slowly transformed diplomacy, reducing communication time from weeks or months (or years, in Pinckney’s case) to a single day, giving governments the opportunity to issue instructions and demand answers, seizing the reins from freewheeling ambassadors and quickening the pace of diplomacy. For envoys used to autonomy and leisurely reflection, the instantaneity was a rude awakening. Stories of their institutional resistance read like comedies of manners. Technology-averse diplomats dug in against typewriters in favor of quill pens and copperplate calligraphy; they argued about whether correspondence should be kept folded or flat for filing and conspired against the intrusion of telephones in their offices.2
In a historical sense, the WikiLeaks release is not unprecedented. The tradition of governmental control of post and telegraph offices meant virtually all diplomatic correspondence was routinely intercepted. Gentlemen were indeed reading one another’s mail. Leaks have been around for a long time, as have frustrated diplomats who believe their point of view is not heard back home. The advent of the telegraph office, a logical extension of the post office, opened a new era in intelligence gathering, with resulting requirements for both encryption and code breaking. Every advance in encryption was countered by an equal leap in deciphering, to the point that diplomats reverted to human couriers as a means of subverting this new and seemingly uncontrollable technology of their era.
Sometimes the content of a diplomatic telegram was so momentous it changed the course of history. For impact, it’s hard to beat the Zimmermann Telegram, written in 1917 by German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann and sent to the German ambassador in Washington, DC, who was to forward it to the German ambassador in Mexico. The telegram instructed the German ambassador to meet with the Mexican president and propose Mexico’s entry into World War I on the side of Germany, in exchange for Germany’s help in regaining Mexico’s lost territories of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
The Germans were about to resume unrestricted submarine warfare and knew this action would likely bring an outraged United States into the war. The telegram was deciphered by the British and given to the Americans, who now had two reasons to be angry at Germany. Given their own expertise in telegraph decoding, the Germans should hardly have been surprised that the British were reading their messages.
Another telegram that made history was Consul General Archer Blood’s cable sent from the U.S. consulate in Dhaka on April 6, 1971, famous for being “probably the most blistering denunciation of U.S. foreign policy ever sent by its own diplomats.” 3 Blood and his staff described the slaughter of Bengalis by the Pakistan Army and denounced the U.S. policy that allowed Pakistan to continue this genocide unchallenged. The famous cable was part of a stream of urgent accounts of atrocities sent from the consulate, all of which were met with silence from Washington. The cables were leaked, by an unknown source, to the New York Times and to Senator Edward Kennedy, giving him ammunition against Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s foreign policy. The series of reports out of Dhaka culminated in what became known as the Blood Telegram, the famous dissent cable signed by twenty officials at the Dhaka consulate and endorsed by nine officers working on South Asian issues within the State Department.4
Dissension from U.S. foreign policy while serving as a diplomat is a long and protected tradition—at least in theory. The State Department has a dissent channel, although few officers use it to express policy disagreement. The reception of Blood’s cables is telling. Upon receiving the April 6 message, Secretary of State William Rogers was alarmed enough to call National Security Advisor Kissinger. “The telegram was ‘miserable,’ ‘terrible,’ and ‘inexcusable.’ It was bad enough that they ‘had bitched about our policies,’ but the real problem was that ‘they had given it lots of distribution so it will probably leak,’ railed Rogers to Kissinger.” 5 Blood was soon transferred, as were many of his colleagues.
But even Blood’s courageous telegram has not had the enduring influence of George Kennan’s Long Telegram, setting out the U.S. containment strategy for the Cold War era. Several generations of American diplomats and scholars of diplomacy view Kennan’s cable, written on seventeen single-spaced pages not counting corrections in February 1946, as an aspirational ideal. The cable was later revised and published as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in Foreign Affairs in July 1947 under the pseudonym X. Even today the impact and reach of Kennan’s cable astounds. What lonely foreign service officer, sitting in some forgotten outpost, has not dreamed of setting out for Washington’s benefit the next containment policy? But many officers do not realize that Kennan, serving then as deputy chief of mission in Moscow, wrote partly in frustration. He felt his viewpoint was not reaching policymakers in Washington. It appears the disconnect between the field and Washington is indeed an old story.
Alas, Kennan’s Long Telegram is remarkable for its uniqueness. No diplomat today, however ambitious, will be making policy from overseas. Even those who serve in Washington find themselves seated around crowded interagency tables that include an expanding list of members of the foreign policymaking, intelligence, and defense communities. Kennan’s time is long past, and the opportunities for a talented foreign service officer to make a similar impact are as historical as the containment policy Kennan authored. But that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped writing.
THE DIPLOMATS: WHO THEY ARE AND WHY THEY WRITE
Everyone has fun defining diplomacy. Some see it as a politer version of espionage, making it the world’s so-called second oldest profession. Other half-serious definitions dwell on duplicity, such as Sir Henry Wotton’s: “An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country.” Thomas Pickering, one of the highest-ranked American diplomats and a seven-time ambassador said, “In archaeology you uncover the unknown. In diplomacy you cover the known.” Another famous quip, attributed to Caskie Stinnett, suggests that there is something not so nice about diplomacy: “A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.” Like all aphorisms, these exist for a reason. They attest to the art of subtlety.
American diplomats may or may not be guilty of all the traits ascribed to them, but they most certainly are analysts and writers. The arduous selection process, which can take up to two years, ensures that most diplomats write well. The fallout from that morning in November marked a rise in their stature. WikiLeaks, if nothing else, earned diplomats the respect of journalists, who often write about the same countries and issues. At the Guardian, one reporter mused, “Who knew American diplomats could write so well?” New York Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger said the cables were “often eloquent and occasionally entertaining,” while his colleague Executive Editor Bill Keller found them to be “written with wit, color, and an ear for dialogue.” 6 They wowed Slate’s Christopher Beam, who thought they read “like their own literary genre, with an identifiable sensibility and set of conventions.” 7 Fareed Zakaria, writing in Time, found they showed “an American diplomatic establishment that is pretty good at analysis,” and British scholar Timothy Garton Ash celebrated accounts “almost worthy of Evelyn Waugh,” with writing that he found to be astute.8
According to the most recent Agency Financial Report, the State Department employed about 73,000 people worldwide in 2015. The roughly 7,900 foreign service officers (FSOs) are only a small fraction of the U.S. government’s overseas workforce, which also includes about 5,700 foreign service specialists and 49,000 locally employed staff, along with others from affiliated agencies such as USAID and the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture. The FSOs populate the five traditional career fields: consular, administrative, political, economic, and public diplomacy. The specialists cover twenty-two functions ranging from office management to information technology to medical fields. Locally employed staff are the backbone of any embassy, spanning drivers in the motor pool all the way up to economic and political analysts, some of whom have PhDs. Given the two- to three-year tours of most FSOs, the local staff provides invaluable continuity, contacts, and historical perspective.
At any given time, about a third of all foreign service officers are assigned to Washington, DC, meaning that nearly all the reporting for cables that later appeared in WikiLeaks was done by about 5,500 FSOs serving in some 270 diplomatic missions overseas.9
Foreign service officers tend to be older than one might think—the median age of a newly hired FSO is thirty-one, but many begin this career in their forties or later. Virtually all have bachelor’s degrees; more than half have master’s or professional degrees. Some are former Peace Corps volunteers; others have served in the military. Some come from academia, some from private industry, some are lawyers, some are linguists. An increasing number have significant overseas experience, running exchange programs, working with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or reporting for news media. Nearly all have held jobs in which writing was important. They join the foreign service to serve their country, out of a sense of adventure, and with a desire to observe other cultures. The relatively short tours for most posts mean that their observations are fresh and rarely become routine.
All foreign service officers write cables, although the ones that garnered the most attention in WikiLeaks tended to come from political officers. By convention, cables are signed on the last line by the ambassador, or in his/her absence, by the chargé d’affaires, the acting ambassador who covers the gap until a new ambassador arrives. In point of practice, very few ambassadors do the actual writing, apart from first-person official-informal (OI) cables. Most diplomats aspire to become ambassadors, and some 65 to 70 percent of ambassadors are career diplomats who rise through the ranks, garnering years of experience at embassies, consulates, and domestic tours in the State Department and other agencies. The remaining 30 to 35 percent, usually sent to Western Europe or to countries of enormous significance, such as China or Mexico, are political appointee ambassadors.
Some political appointees are former elected officials or distinguished public servants, such as former senator Max Baucus, ambassador to China, but others have come under fire for having minimal qualifications beyond financial support of the winning presidential candidate, a factor that sometimes puts Washington and career officers at odds in a way that long predates WikiLeaks. One group of ambassadorial nominees that appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for confirmation hearings in January 2014 was apparently so underprepared that Senator John McCain began correcting their erroneous statements. Hollywood producer Colleen Bell, nominated to be ambassador to Hungary, stumbled badly trying to articulate U.S. strategic interests in that country. “Great answer,” McCain said, his sarcasm readily apparent. At the end of an embarrassing hearing for Bell and two other political ambassadorial nominees, McCain looked disgusted. “I have no more questions for this incredibly highly qualified group of nominees.” Career FSOs may have grimaced inwardly but held their tongues.
If writing cables is not a fast track to an ambassadorship, why do diplomats write? In part because it is irresistible. FSOs seek careers that will transport them far from home. But that distance can be confusing, and reconciling Washington’s policies with truths on the ground is frustrating. Diplomats make meaning of their surroundings by writing about them. For many officers, the process helps them make sense of new experiences. They often write private journals or blogs in addition to their official writing duties. A few write books upon retirement, especially memoirs. But some also put great effort into making their observations part of the historical record. While there will never be another George Kennan, there are plenty of opportunities to recount a conversation, to describe a political development, a crisis unfolding, or even a trip to the hinterlands. Diplomats jump at penning these tiny pieces of history that will be part of the official record.
THE ART OF DIPLOMATIC REPORTING
Every day hundreds of cables flood into the State Department from its missions around the world. Dozens of bureaus are filled with personnel assigned to read them and take action. Mandatory reporting requirements mean the number of cables continues to increase, but too often foreign service officers are writing for a distracted audience of one: an overtasked desk officer who spends the usual two years in the assignment, discouraged from bringing any but the most noteworthy telegrams to the attention of busy superiors.
Understanding the flow of diplomatic reporting to and from Washington is a story of both too much and too little, and often not at the right time. Too much, because the daily tranche of cables guarantees an overwhelming amount of data; too little, because it is impossible to know and report on everything. At the wrong time, because of the speed at which Washington decision makers must function. While yesterday’s diplomats waited for mail packets to be shipped across the Atlantic and for telegrams to be deciphered, today’s can barely be out of the office for an hour before an urgent communication might arrive.
Knowing by instinct when and what to communicate back home is what makes a good diplomat. Their reporting must walk a line between loyally carrying out assignments from Washington, while making essential, sometimes contradictory, points to a foreign policy establishment that does not always want to hear them. In a tragic example of this disconnect, Ambassador Prudence Bushnell famously wrangled with the State Department over the security deficit at Embassy Nairobi in the months before the 1998 bombing that destroyed it and several surrounding structures. She sent multiple cables and pleaded for assistance, but with the State Department budget cut to the bone, security was expensive and subject to lengthy congressional consultations. “When I returned to Washington on consultations in December of ’97, I was told point-blank by the AF [Africa Bureau] Executive Office to stop sending cables because people were getting very irritated with me. That really pushed up my blood pressure.” Bushnell had the grim satisfaction of being right, as she stood at attention, still injured herself, alongside the flag-draped coffins of her colleagues following the al-Qaeda bombing that had left 213 dead.10
Ironically, when long-delayed security upgrades resulted in a building boom of dozens of new embassy compounds situated far from urban areas, diplomats fruitlessly complained that they were now working in fortresses that kept them away from terrorists and contacts alike. Some saw the new fortress mentality as a challenge—just another security hurdle to be overcome in a world full of locked safes and doors. Then, fourteen years after Bushnell’s Nairobi experience, Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three of his colleagues were killed in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11–12, 2012.
Stevens, part of a new generation of diplomats, was a prime exemplar of the “transformational diplomacy” both Secretaries Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton advocated. He had lived and worked in the region for years, spoke fluent Arabic, and performed the job he’d been asked to do—reaching out to segments of Libyan society during a troubled transition after the overthrow of dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The question of how much the State Department knew about the deteriorating Libyan security situation would derail Susan Rice’s ambition to follow Hillary Clinton as secretary of state and colored Clinton’s last appearance before the Senate as she ended her tenure. The Benghazi tragedy illustrates the tension between the security demands for safety and diplomats’ need to get out of fortresslike embassies and meet with local people.
The U.S. Congress has an abiding interest in American diplomacy, and its engagement with diplomats encompasses Senate confirmation hearings for ambassadorial nominees and senior State Department officials; embassy efforts to broker meaningful in-country visits for congressional delegations; and Congress’s interest in diplomatic reporting. Many of the 133,887 unclassified cables in WikiLeaks demonstrate the enormous growth of congressionally mandated cables. This category includes reports written to a one-size-fits-all template. Some examples include the annual Human Rights Report, the Trafficking in Persons Report, the International Religious Freedom Report, and the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report. Others are specific to certain groups of countries, such as the Special 301 Report, which rates countries’ compliance with intellectual property rights, and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR.
The main categories of secret, confidential, and unclassified are just the beginning. Official-informal cables are often written in the first person by ambassadors, such as Christopher Dell’s now well-publicized assessment of Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe. Scene setters are required in advance of visiting American policymakers, ranging from congressional delegations and administration officials up to and including cabinet officers and the president; such visits are always followed by a cable describing the visit, cleared when possible by the delegation head. Embassies also craft and update biographic profiles of heads of state, cabinet ministers, and parliamentarians, along with high-profile leaders from civil society, with the idea that any abrupt change of government should not leave Washington starting from scratch.
Foreign service officers also file spot reports, meant to be quick updates on unexpected developments, and election reports before, during, and after foreign voters go to the polls. Many embassies also submit daily media reaction, in which staffers translate excerpts from editorials and op-eds that cover themes Washington has flagged in a weekly watch list. During a crisis, embassy officers file situation reports, or sitreps, meant to provide the State Department’s operations center with daily—or even hourly—updates. In the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake of January 12, 2010, there were dozens of sitreps from the embassy in Port-au-Prince. (More were likely sent after February 28, beyond the end date of the WikiLeaks release.)
Sometimes the demand for embassy reporting becomes insatiable. The State Department inspector general’s May 2012 report on Embassy Islamabad came down hard on Washington’s “intense and at times intrusive involvement and voracious appetite for information on Pakistan . . . consuming extraordinary amounts of the mission’s time and energy and adding significantly to the stresses at the already stressed post.” 11
But when all of the above is accomplished, diplomats carve out time to record their own impressions, unbidden by Washington. These cables, akin to feature stories in journalism, are slices of life, things that catch the eye or ear of a curious diplomat. They round out the routine reporting and are among the best of the WikiLeaks release. Some of the more widely publicized cables chronicled weddings in Dagestan and conversations in cafes or corridors of power. Reading them offers insight into why people would do this work, despite the hardships of unaccompanied tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. They want to experience something no Washington cubicle can offer. The cables illustrate too that the real meaning of living in Laos won’t be found sitting behind the embassy walls of Vientiane.
Of course, cables are not the only way, nor always the best way, to communicate. Diplomats also use phones, and the frequency of visitors from Washington, as well as chances to return to headquarters for consultations, offer ample opportunities for face-to-face conversations, none of which are part of WikiLeaks. The leaked cables have their limitations. The format and intended audience predispose writers to portray countries through a solidly American lens—not always the best way to uncover more subtle distinctions. Officers are trained from the outset to link their cables to Washington interests and to anticipate and answer the “so what?” question.
Globalization has made countries more similar—especially in capital cities. Foreign ministries tend to organize themselves and operate in recognizable ways. Outside their doors, brand-name clothing stores, fast food outlets, and international manufacturers are familiar. Often, it is only when diplomats leave the embassy behind and travel beyond the capitals and government districts that countries appear different. Sometimes writers let go of the American lens and describe a country, its people, or an event in its own right. Unsurprisingly, these are often the most interesting cables.
SECRECY VERSUS DIPLOMACY
WikiLeaks claimed the cable dump was “the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain,” a claim that needs examining. It makes the feat sound more sensational than it actually was. Only about 6 percent of the cables—some 15,652—are classified as secret. Those marked confidential number 101,748. That means that a little more than half, or 133,887, are unclassified. The reason for this is obvious. Much of diplomatic work is routine, and diplomats frequently write with a wide audience in mind.
Much of the initial reporting about WikiLeaks focused on the sheer volume of the release. But volume does not equate to insight or revelation. Size is also relative. In the period from 2006 to 2010, the U.S. government disseminated 2.4 million cables, ten times as many, through other systems.12 Seen that way, the total amount of classified data held by the U.S. government makes the WikiLeaks release look almost small.
News articles about WikiLeaks didn’t mention that the officer writing the cable decides its level of classification—and gives a date upon which the cable may be declassified. What makes a cable deserving of classified status? The need to protect sources, along with the need to protect the U.S. government. Officers are told to ask themselves how damaging the information would be to national security were it to be disclosed. The government requires that the classification “secret” be applied to information whose unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to national security. “Confidential” should be applied to information whose unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause damage to the national security.
This very imprecise, almost theological distinction assumes all officers define national security the same way. It also assumes an officer sitting in a remote posting would be able to know precisely how much damage disclosure of the information would cause. Sometimes the classification is obvious; other times it is arguable. Officers tend to overclassify on the theory that a secret cable will get more attention in Washington than a confidential one, and a cable marked unclassified must not say anything of importance. Former secretary of state George Shultz makes the point, “The higher the classified level of secrecy, the quicker you will report it.” Thus relative importance tends to creep upward as officers consider how to classify their writing. And although the WikiLeaks release was an embarrassment to the U.S. government, potential embarrassment is not a classification factor.
The WikiLeaks organization made its selection of cables sound calculated and intentional. In fact, the feat was the electronic equivalent of sticking your hand into a bag of candy and scooping up as much as possible. In this case, the grab covered the period from December 28, 1966, through February 28, 2010, although the bulk of the cables are from January 2006 through February 2010. They originated from 275 American embassies, consulates, and diplomatic missions.
WikiLeaks director Julian Assange told the media that the cables showed “the extent of U.S. spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuses in ‘client states’; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for U.S. corporations; and the measures U.S. diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.”13
That is one interpretation, and some of the cables published in the New York Times, the Guardian, and elsewhere lend that view some credence. But lost in all the controversy is the understanding that the leaked cables are only half of the equation—they reflect the view from the field, not the home office. Assange was shooting the messenger, who, the cables show, was making the best of instructions that were not always feasible.
Assange also castigated diplomats for lobbying for corporations. Indeed, that is a straightforward part of their mission, and one that Congress and the corporate world emphatically expect. Seeking a level playing field when U.S. corporations are bidding on lucrative tenders is a time-honored part of diplomatic work. And in a world where bribery, corruption, and lack of transparency are too frequently the norm, it is a necessary part of the job.
WikiLeaks misunderstands the purpose of diplomacy by confusing it with secrecy. Assange’s overriding contempt for the American government blinded him to some subtle aspects of the practice of modern diplomacy. He was sure the cables showed “duplicity and mendacity in action.” Journalists were largely unpersuaded, with Fareed Zakaria noting, “There is little deception.” A more considered explanation is that the cables show the analytical value added of officers in the field and demonstrate the reason all countries have embassies. If Washington needed only facts, policymakers could read the New York Times and watch CNN. Diplomats are trained to provide far more. Like reporters, they rely heavily on sources, and for the same reasons they would not survive if they were, as Assange believed, duplicitous and mendacious.
Ambassadors enjoy enviable access and go where reporters often cannot. They are invited to the inner sanctums of presidents, ministers, and parliamentarians. Working-level diplomats seek out thinkers behind ideas and causes that may or may not coincide with U.S. interests. Where it exists, they engage with civil society. With resources unmatched by any but the wealthiest of NGOs, they go everywhere. Diplomats stay in one country for only two or three years, but over the course of a career they learn to find the right people, ask the right questions, and make the most of their limited time. Timothy Garton Ash noted the similarities between diplomats and foreign correspondents, but he also drew a distinction. “There is a particular quality to what a head of state or government—the king of Saudi Arabia or the French president—says to the ambassador of a superpower—which, of course, gives it a different quality. It’s not just like talking to the New York Times.” 14
Diplomats also deliver messages, but doing that well is a two-way street. They are not only adept at writing to Washington but invaluable at helping foreign leaders decode messages from Washington. While onetime presidential candidate Ross Perot famously said that diplomats could be replaced by fax machines, he ignored the real art in delivering a message that offers an opportunity for a conversation. Diplomats listen for the reaction. In many cultures a diplomat has to know when yes means no, or maybe, or we’ll see. The most skillful diplomats not only deliver messages but explore them with the recipients, test out scenarios, suggest ways of using the information, and discuss the implications of the message. This is hard work. Assange’s rant falls far from the reality.
THE DIPLOMATIC FALLOUT
In Buenos Aires, the chargé told his colleagues, “We have two bad choices: try to run and hide or go out and take a beating.” He chose to engage the press and defend diplomacy—with a dose of humility.15
Half a world away, the political officer’s cell phone rang out in the cubby, and the call rolled over to her desk phone. An old source, sounding more bemused than worried, wanted to know if he would be featured on WikiLeaks.
Throughout the week of November 29, 2010, American diplomats around the world were receiving similar phone calls and queries. At best, their contacts were unsettled. At worst they felt betrayed.
Obama administration officials were quick to deplore the leaks but almost equally quick to minimize them. Members of Congress were also out of sync. Some took a hard line, such as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who called Assange a “high-tech terrorist,” and Senator Lindsey Graham, who said “People who do this are low on the food chain, as far as I’m concerned.” On the other side of the question, if not the aisle, former Representative Ron Paul said the leaks had caused “no harm to any individual,” and that “the hysterical reaction makes one wonder if this is not an example of killing the messenger.”
Former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said, “Anything less than execution is too kind a penalty” for the source of the leaks. Former senator Joe Lieberman offered an assessment worthy of a middle school principal with the underwhelming suggestion that the New York Times was guilty of “bad citizenship.”
Every aspect of the circumstances surrounding the leak was contentious. Some Washington columnists pointed to the more gossipy bits of the cables as proof that the reporting should not be taken seriously; others used examples from the same cables to argue that it should be. One victim of the difficulty in striking the right tone was State Department spokesperson P. J. Crowley, who was forced to resign on March 13, 2011, after describing the conditions under which Private Chelsea Manning was being held as “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.”
The diplomats in the field kept their own counsel, having been stunned twice. It was bad enough to deal with the publication of writings about sources they still saw on a daily basis, but now they were thrown off balance by the whipsaw PR offensive in Washington. While most of those currently serving refrained from speaking, they counted on their retired colleagues to defend and explain their work. The retirees took a predictable line.
Former ambassador Ronald Neumann, president of the American Academy of Diplomacy, told NPR, “I’m amused by the fact that people are finding it surprising that cables are frank. . . . They think because we’re not always frank in public that we can’t be frank with each other.” Speaking on the same program, former ambassador Christopher Hill, now dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, said WikiLeaks would have a chilling effect. “It’s hard to have a senior official of a foreign government say things in front of a note taker just to begin with, and now to worry that those notes will be not only turned into a cable but that the cable will be turned into a newspaper article is worrisome.” 16
Former ambassador to NATO and Greece and current Harvard Kennedy School professor Nicholas Burns said the damage was enormous. “I think the leaking of these cables has been a travesty,” Burns said. “He [Assange] has done great harm to our diplomacy, because it strikes at the heart of what diplomacy is: The building of trust between people and between governments. The leaks violate that trust and are going to make some people, not everyone or every government, but some people, much more reluctant to discuss their affairs with American diplomats.” 17
Stephen Hadley, former national security advisor, said on the PBS NewsHour that in the short run, “It’s going to have some very deleterious effects . . . if we cannot keep the secrets and the confidences of other governments, they will be reluctant to share their innermost thoughts with us. It also is corrupting because our people in diplomatic posts overseas want to be able to give their candid assessments about people with whom they’re dealing . . . It’s important to inform the president, secretary of state. They will now be reluctant to be as candid in the reporting cables.” 18
Speaking on the same news show, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, also inclined to the long view, breezily described the leaks with a phrase he said dated back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire: “It’s catastrophic, but not serious.” Brzezinski also deprecated the impact of leaked biographic reporting: “Who cares if Berlusconi is described as a clown? Most Italians agree with that. Who cares if Putin is described as an alpha dog? He probably is flattered by it.”
Secrecy is a troubling concept for the American body politic. John Campbell, writing in the Council on Foreign Relations’ Expert Roundup, noted that WikiLeaks offends a fundamental American assumption about openness.19 Taking that argument further, the idea of secret cables contradicts the Wilsonian view of diplomacy that has worked its way into the American consciousness as evinced in the first of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points: “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.” Such ringing words sound great but reveal a naiveté about how modern diplomacy works.
This uniquely American belief that diplomacy should be transparent ran headlong into WikiLeaks, which seemed to show American diplomats as secretive. Politicians found it easy to use WikiLeaks to leverage the notion that diplomats are disloyal and unaccountable for the behind-the-scenes deals they make. This kind of thinking is compounded by the State Department’s inability to articulate and create public support for its role. A comment by former Texas governor Rick Perry in a November 11, 2011, radio program with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly symbolized the depth of the problem. “I’m not sure our State Department serves us well. I’m not talking about the Secretary of State here. I’m talking about the career diplomats . . . who all too often may not be making decisions or giving advice to the administration that’s in this country’s best interest.”
Those words, uttered nearly a year after the WikiLeaks release, resonate for a segment of the population whose distrust for the State Department and diplomacy is deep-rooted and ongoing.
Signs of the disconnect between Washington and its diplomats emerged the same day as the WikiLeaks release. The Obama administration was quick to distance itself from WikiLeaks, from the content of the leaked cables, and occasionally, even from those who wrote them. The lines became so blurred that it was hard to tell if the real problem was WikiLeaks or the cable writers. At worst, diplomats overseas were either disenfranchised from the foreign policy establishment or made invisible. The tone around Washington was dismissive.
“I want to make clear that our official foreign policy is not set through these messages, but here in Washington,” Secretary of State Clinton said at a November 29 press conference, leaving the role of U.S. diplomats in foreign policy an open question.
White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs joined the effort to downgrade the cables, saying, “By its very nature, field reporting to Washington is candid and often incomplete information. It is not an expression of policy, nor does it always shape final policy decisions.” Listeners were left to wonder what was the point of having diplomats, if all they offer is incomplete information and they don’t shape policy decisions.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates also dismissed the idea of any real damage. “I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game changer, and so on. I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. 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.” Gates insisted information sharing would continue. “Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.” 20
Gates offered a historical perspective, quoting John Adams, to illustrate that WikiLeaks was nothing new. “How can a government go on, publishing all of their negotiations with foreign nations, I know not. To me, this appears as dangerous and pernicious as it is novel.” To Gates’s way of thinking, WikiLeaks was a more modern version of the back rooms in telegraph offices where diplomatic dispatches were routinely decoded before being sent onward.
In an understandable rush to minimize the crisis, the cable writers were minimized too. Washington’s dismissive tone often focused on the relative weight and importance of the cables, rather than the leak itself. That had the unfortunate ancillary effect of associating the diplomats with the embarrassment. Absent from the State Department, White House, and Defense Department response was any mention that diplomats are members of the U.S. foreign policy community who contribute to informed internal debate, enhanced by the fact that they live, work, and often speak the language in some of the world’s most remote and complex countries.
Instead, Washington spokespeople were quick with indignation over WikiLeaks’ putting sources at risk, a fact they mentioned often. What they always failed to mention was that one of the most damaging cables, instructing diplomats to collect cell phone and credit card information on foreign diplomats working at the United Nations, actually came from Foggy Bottom.
The Washington line was a success, of sorts. A few commentators furthered the misalignment between the field and Washington by opining that the diplomatic reporting was not much more than a collection of gossipy cables, such as one citing Muammar Gaddafi’s relations with his voluptuous Ukrainian nurse, and was of negligible impact on foreign policy.
But there was a downside to the minimization. Frederick Hitz, senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Center for National Security Law and former CIA inspector general, said the attempt to minimize had gone so far that the government had substantially weakened its own case against Assange. “American officials are working overtime to downplay the seriousness of the leaks. And as embarrassing as they are, that’s not the standard of prosecution.” 21
Asked if it wasn’t ironic, inconsistent, or even hypocritical that Secretary of State Clinton’s much-publicized Internet Freedom Initiative, articulated in a Newseum speech in January 2010, was in conflict with those like Assange who were pushing the boundaries of that freedom, Hitz agreed. “They are walking a tightrope, to be sure. In one sense transparency is good, in another seeing your own diplomatic cables displayed on pages of the New York Times is disquieting.” 22
Clinton’s remarks to the State Department traveling press on January 9, 2011, seemed to bear out his observation. “I think I will be answering concerns about WikiLeaks for the rest of my life, not just the rest of my tenure as secretary of state. I’ve told my team that I want to get one of those really sharp-looking jackets that rock-and-roll groups have on tours. And I could have a big picture of the world, and it could say ‘The Apology Tour.’”
Clinton’s public remarks furthered the idea that it was an etiquette flap rather than a security breach, repairable with exhausting rounds of polite visits and reassuring phone calls. Despite a humorous delivery, her message suggested that only thanks to endless work had the matter begun to fade.
“I have been very, very much involved in reaching out to leaders and others who have concerns about either the general message of our confidential communications being exposed in this way or specific questions about their country or themselves,” she said. “That aspect has receded a lot. I’ve done an enormous amount of work, as have other members of our government, but it still is in the atmosphere.”
Hitz’s warning would prove prescient. By 2013 it was clear that the Department of Justice was unlikely to mount a case against Assange, with most legal experts agreeing that his role as recipient of leaked material was different from that of Private Manning’s.
What no one knew on that Monday morning in November 2010 was that WikiLeaks was only the first of many incidents in which government secrets, large and small, would be revealed. Edward Snowden was waiting in the wings. The Russians would tweet an eavesdropped conversation in which the State Department’s assistant secretary for European affairs and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine would scheme over who should and should not be in a future Ukranian government. Revelations that America was not alone in spying would come to the fore.
But the most important disconnect was far more subtle. From one topic to another, the cables reveal a rift between diplomats’ pragmatic and realistic view of what was possible in the world of 2006 to 2010 and Washington policymakers’ far more ideological and ambitious agenda.