WikiLeaks (29 page)

What effect the attack had on MasterCard’s actual financial operations is unclear: the company did not say whether transactions (which would be carried out over secure lines to its main computers) were affected. It largely ignored the attack, hoping not to inflame the attackers. The tactic worked; Anonymous next considered turning its ire on Amazon and PayPal, but the disorganised nature of the group meant they could not muster enough firepower to knock either site offline; Amazon was too big, while PayPal withstood some attacks. The suggestion made privately was that the powerful hackers who had acted against MasterCard did not want to inconvenience themselves by taking out PayPal, which they used themselves all the time.

This event was something new – the internet equivalent of a noisy political demonstration. What had begun with a couple of teenage nerds had morphed into a cyber-uprising against attempts to restrict information. As they put it in one portentous YouTube video, upon a soundtrack of thrashing guitars: “We are everywhere.” They were certainly in the Netherlands, at least, where, in December, police arrested a 16-year-old and a 19-year-old. Some Anonymous supporters without sufficient computer skills had overlooked the fact that the software – called LOIC – being offered to them to run attacks would give away their internet location. Police could, given time, tie that to a physical user.

Behind all this online turbulence, however, a much more serious game was afoot. President Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, called a press conference to announce there was now an “active,
ongoing, criminal investigation” into the leaking of classified information. He promised to hold those who broke US law “accountable”, and said: “To the extent that there are gaps in our laws, we will move to close those gaps, which is not to say that anybody at this point, because of their citizenship or residence, is not a target or a subject of an investigation that is ongoing.” In Alexandria, Virginia, just outside Washington, rumours began to spread that a secret grand jury had been empanelled, and many subpoenas were being prepared for issue. Bradley Manning, the young soldier who had by now spent seven months in virtual solitary confinement, would only see an end to his harsh treatment, his friends started to believe, if he was willing to implicate Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in some serious crimes.

It seemed clear that prosecuting Assange – an Australian citizen now living in the UK – for espionage or conspiracy was going to be an uphill affair, not least because of the old-fashioned nature of the US Espionage Act. But it was also clear that an exasperated White House wanted to be seen vigorously pursuing this option. Would the justice department try and winkle Assange out of his hideaway in the English countryside? And was there not a still unresolved police investigation into his behaviour in Sweden? The threat of extradition – and the possibility of several decades in a US supermax jail – began to loom over Assange, as the rest of the world sought to digest the significance of the cascade of documents he had released.

Cyberspace
30 November 2010

“
It is the historian’s dream. It is the diplomat’s nightmare
”
T
IMOTHY
G
ARTON
A
SH, HISTORIAN

What did we learn from WikiLeaks? The question, as with virtually everything else to do with the leaks, was polarising. There was, from the start, a metropolitan yawn from
bien pensants
who felt they knew it all. Arabs don’t like Iran? The Russian government is corrupt? Some African countries are kleptocracies? Go on, astonish us. You’ll be telling us next that the pope is Catholic.

According to this critique the disclosures stated the obvious, and amounted to no more than “humdrum diplomatic pillow talk”. (This was from the
London Review of Books
. Academic Glen Newey said he was unimpressed by the revelation that French leader Nicolas Sarkozy “is a short man with a Napoleon complex”.)

Then there were the people who argued that the cables did not reveal enough bad behaviour by Americans. On the left this was a cause for disappointment – and, sometimes, suspicion. A small cabal began poring over the cables for evidence of ideological editing or censorship. And why so little on Israel? On the
right, and from government, this served as fuel for the argument that there was no public interest in publication. This was not the Pentagon papers, they reasoned. There was little malfeasance in American foreign policy revealed in the documents, so where’s the justification for revealing all? Then there was the US government’s insistence that the leaks were endangering lives, wrecking Washington’s ability to do business with its allies and partners, and helping terrorists.

What these arguments missed was the hunger for the cables in countries that didn’t have fully functioning democracies or the sort of free expression enjoyed in London, Paris or New York. Within hours of the first cables being posted the
Guardian
started receiving a steady stream of pleading requests from editors and journalists around the world wanting to know what the cables revealed about their own countries and rulers. It was easier to call the revelations unstartling, dull even, if one lived in western Europe, rather than in Belarus, Tunisia, or in any other oppressive regime.

This was as powerful a case for the WikiLeaks disclosures as any. It was not particularly edifying to see western commentators and politicians decrying the public interest in the publication of information which was being avidly, even desperately, sought after by people in far off countries of which they doubtless knew little. Who was to say what effect these disclosures would have, even if, on one level, they were revealing things that were in some sense known? The very fact of publication often served as authentication and verification of things that were suspected.

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.