Between gossip and intelligence: Some thoughts on #cablegate and #wikileaks

Once again, wikileaks managed to grab the attention of the world media. They started publishing 251,287 United States cables sent from, or to, US embassies around the world. They named it Cablegate and indeed it is a unprecedented leak of diplomatic material. Some initial thoughts:

We don’t know enough. So far wikileaks published 220 out of 251287 diplomatic cables. Wikileaks announced that they would release cables in stages over the next few months. They learnt a lesson how to keep the media interested. Remember the Daily Telegraph and the expense scandal in the UK? They published something every couple of days – which made it much more damaging and created a huge political scandal. So, I guess we need to wait and see what else will happen. According to wikileaks the cables can be broadly labelled as follows.

15, 652 secret

101,748 confidential

133,887 unclassified

Iraq most discussed country – 15,365 (Cables coming from Iraq – 6,677)

Ankara, Turkey had most cables coming from it – 7,918

From Secretary of State office – 8,017

Wikileaks continues with its model to work with a couple of selected media outlets. The New York Times, Spiegel, The Guardian, El Pais, Le Monde and owni.fr. got access to the files after signing an agreement of confidentiality. Some might criticise that because many other journalists do not have the opportunity to analyse the data thoroughly prior to publication. However, wikileaks learnt that without such a process most files will go unnoticed and much of the momentum gets lost. At the same time it is quite a good business model as it guarantees mainstream media a degree of exclusivity – something the wikileaks team members announced already a year ago. Wikileaks need the mainstream media to be successful – and the mainstream media only need wikileaks if they can get some exclusive rights. (Personally, I think wikileaks should return to a more collaborative and participatory approach instead of focusing on high profile and “event like” leaks…)

There are – as usual- too many pundits that claim that they know the implications of the leak already. The newspapers will focus on the “funny” headlines how diplomats describe certain politicians etc. I doubt that many will actually put cables in context and try to explain why they were written. It is also important to note that although a certain ambassador might be ‘quoted’, the cable was written by other policy analysts that work in political reporting. The ambassador might have not even read the report! As far as I can see it there are no “top secret” cables which makes it even more likely that most of the content was routine stuff. Anyway, to get a basic idea about the cables, the most important article you should read is by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian who not only states that “the job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment” – but more importantly he highlights a crucial fact that most commentators will fail to report:

The state department knew of the leak several months ago and had ample time to alert staff in sensitive locations. Its pre-emptive scaremongering over the weekend stupidly contrived to hint at material not in fact being published. Nor is the material classified top secret, being at a level that more than 3 million US government employees are cleared to see, and available on the defence department’s internal Siprnet. Such dissemination of “secrets” might be thought reckless, suggesting a diplomatic outreach that makes the British empire seem minuscule.

The revelations do not have the startling, coldblooded immediacy of the WikiLeaks war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan, with their astonishing insight into the minds of fighting men seemingly detached from the ethics of war. The’s disclosures are largely of analysis and high-grade gossip. Insofar as they are sensational, it is in showing the corruption and mendacity of those in power, and the mismatch between what they claim and what they do.

It is very likely that other secret services have seen this kind of intelligence before. If wikileaks manages to get hold of this dataset it wouldn’t surprise me if others also managed to do so. After all, any network that can be accessed by millions of government employees is not that difficult to hack.

The most striking implication is the likely transformation of diplomacy. Diplomacy changed over the years but it never experienced radical change. The system always relied on written and unwritten rules of secrecy. Moreover, “traditional political reporting” assumes that only staff in a particular city are able to gather facts of the political situation in this country. This also includes newspaper summaries – and many policy officers do rely on media reports. Well, somehow diplomacy is still the same system as several hundred years ago – with the exception that cables are now electronic. But it is obvious that Cablegate” would have not happened if diplomats still communicated with letters. Diplomacy entered the 21st century!

“Cablegate” represents a demystification of diplomacy and foreign policy. We get a first hand account of how embassies work and that political reporting is in fact done by human beings. The problem is that some private conversations will now be in the newspapers which can be a problem for some people. Obviously there will some sensitive material which will result in major political scandal. A taster for this kind of information are the revelations of spy missions at the UN headquarters by US diplomats as well as signs of corruption in US aid programmes. However, the implications might be more problematic for autocratic and dictatorial regimes as they often act differently in international diplomacy than they do “at home”. In countries like Germany or UK most cables could have been written by an average political analysts (or bloggers!). So far, most cables correspond with the mainstream analysis of US foreign policy (and domestic politics!). However, it will be interesting to compare media reporting in different countries.

The cables are great for research. In the words of Timothy Garton Ash: It is the historian’s dream. It is the diplomat’s nightmare.

And last but not least. What about the EU? There is category for the US mission to the EU and a EU search tag. There are some mentions of the EU in cables from the several US embassies in Berlin, London, Paris and Rome. Not sure whether we will see a lot of revelations there. MEP Marietje Schaake asked the European Commission a couple of questions regarding the leaks here. And the answers are here. Not surprisingly, and now confirmed by Der Spiegel, we learnt that Obama has “no emotional relationship with Europe,” and that he prefers to focus on Asia instead. However, the most interesting case to follow could well be the 7,918 cables from Turkey.

To be continued…

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Between gossip and intelligence: Some thoughts on #cablegate and #wikileaks

Between gossip and intelligence: Some thoughts on #cablegate and wikileaks

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