Leaked cables put diplomats in harsh light

WASHINGTON — A cache of a quarter-million confidential U.S. diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an unprecedented look at backroom bargaining by embassies around the world, candid views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.

Some of the cables, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, were written as recently as late February, revealing the Obama administration’s exchanges over crises and conflicts. The material was originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to revealing secret documents. WikiLeaks posted the first installment of the archive on its website Sunday.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and U.S. 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 [Barack] Obama supports responsible, accountable, and open government at home and around the world, but this reckless and dangerous action runs counter to that goal. 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 U.S. relations with the world in an age of war and terrorism. Among their revelations:

Since 2007, the U.S. has mounted a highly secret effort, so far unsuccessful, to remove from a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that U.S. officials fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device.

In May 2009, Ambassador Anne Patterson reported that Pakistan was refusing to schedule a visit by U.S. 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.”

U.S. 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 fall apart.

The South Koreans even considered commercial inducements to China, the U.S. ambassador to Seoul said. She told Washington in February that South Korean officials believe the right business deals would “help salve” China’s “concerns about living with a reunified Korea” that is in a “benign alliance” with the U.S.

When U.S. diplomats pressed other countries to resettle Guantanamo Bay detainees, the State Department used it as a bargaining chip. Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim detainees, cables from diplomats recounted.

When Afghanistan’s vice president visited the United Arab Emirates last year, local authorities working with the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered he was carrying $52 million in cash.

A cable from the U.S. 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.” Massoud denies taking any money out of Afghanistan.

China’s Politburo directed the intrusion into Google’s computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the U.S. 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 U.S. government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and U.S. businesses since 2002, cables said.

Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups such as al-Qaida, and the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar - a generous host to the U.S. military for years - was the “worst in the region” in counter terrorism 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.

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 4,000are designated both secret and noforn.

Many more cables name diplomats’ confidential sources, often with a warning to Washington: “Please protect” or “Strictly protect.”

The Times said it withheld the names of some people who spoke privately to diplomats and might be at risk if they were publicly identified. It said it also withheld some passages or entire cables whose disclosure could compromise U.S. intelligence efforts.

The Guardian of the U.K., France’s Le Monde, Spain’s El Pais and Der Spiegel of Germany also obtained the documents for publication.

OF RUSSIA AND RICKSHAW

The cables depict the Obama administration struggling to sort out which Pakistanis are trustworthy partners against al-Qaida, 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 U.S. Consulate.

They show U.S. officials managing relations with a China on the rise and a Russia retreating from democracy.They document years of effort to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon - and of worry about a possible Israeli strike on Iran with the same goal.

Even when they recount events that are already known, the cables offer new details.

For instance, it has been previously reported that the Yemeni government has sought to cover up the U.S. role in missile strikes against the local branch of al-Qaida. But a cable provides a fly-on the-wall account of a January meeting between the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and Gen. David Petraeus, then the U.S. commander in the Middle East.

“We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh said, according to the cable sent by the U.S. 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.

The cables also disclose frank private comments. 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 Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, King Abdullah is reported to have said, “You and Iraq are in my heart, but that man is not.” The king also reportedly called President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan the greatest obstacle to that country’s progress, saying, “When the head is rotten,it affects the whole body.”

Perhaps the biggest problem posed by the cables comes from diplomats’ candid narratives of meetings with foreign figures.

Some examples recount U.S. 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 a sharp dressed Karzai trying to win over the Americans with tales about his years running a Chicago restaurant near Wrigley Field. But in midnarrative there is an 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.” Karzai has repeatedly denied such charges.

WHITE HOUSE WORRIES

The White House noted Sunday that “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.”

“Nevertheless, these cables could compromise private discussions with foreign governments and opposition leaders, and when the substance of private conversations is printed on the front pages of newspapers across the world, it can deeply impact not only U.S. foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world,” the White House said.

In a statement released Sunday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said, “The cables show the U.S. spying on its allies and the U.N.; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in ‘client states’; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries and lobbying for U.S. corporations.”

The Sunday release is the first in a series planned over the next few months, he said.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley played down the spying allegations. “Our diplomats are just that, diplomats,” he said. “They collect information that shapes our policies and actions. This is what diplomats, from our country and other countries, have done for hundreds of years.”

The State Department’s top lawyer, Harold Koh, warned Assange late Saturday that lives and military operations would be put at risk if the cables were released and said WikiLeaks would be breaking the law if it went ahead.

The documents were available on the WikiLeaks website Sunday afternoon. The site was inaccessible much of the day, and the group claimed it was under a cyberattack.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon on Sunday released a summary of precautions taken since WikiLeaks previously published stolen war logs from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since August, the Pentagon said it has changed the way portable computer storage devices can be used with classified systems, and made it harder for one person to download material from a classified network and place it on an unclassified one.

Sunday evening, Crowley announced Clinton is headed on a four-nation diplomatic tour to Central Asia and the Persian Gulf beginning Tuesday, but said the trip had been planned long before the leaked documents were published Sunday.

Information for this article was contributed by Scott Shane, Andrew W. Lehren, Jo Becker, C.J. Chivers, James Glanz, Eric Lichtblau, Michael R. Gordon, DavidE. Sanger, Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, Ginger Thompson and Jane Perlez of The New York Times; by Matthew Lee, Anne Gearan, Juergen Baetz, Don Melvin, Angela Doland, Robert H. Reid, Brian Murphy, Mark Lavie and Nicole Winfield of The Associated Press; and by Miles Weiss, Joshua Zumbrun and Viola Gienger of Bloomberg News.