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The US embassy cables
How 250,000 US embassy cables were leaked
>From a fake Lady Gaga CD to a thumb drive that is a pocket-sized bombshell
>the biggest intelligence leak in history
* guardian.co.uk, Sunday 28 November 2010 18.14 GMT
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* Article history
An innocuous-looking memory stick, no longer than a couple of fingernails, came
into the hands of a Guardian reporter earlier this year. The device is so small
it will hang easily on a keyring. But its contents will send shockwaves through
the world's chancelleries and deliver what one official described as "an epic
blow" to US diplomacy.
The 1.6 gigabytes of text files on the memory stick ran to millions of words:
the contents of more than 250,000 leaked state department cables, sent from, or
to, US embassies around the world.
What will emerge in the days and weeks ahead is an unprecedented picture of
secret diplomacy as conducted by the planet's sole superpower. There are
251,287 dispatches in all, from more than 250 US embassies and consulates. They
reveal how the US deals with both its allies and its enemies negotiating,
pressuring and sometimes brusquely denigrating foreign leaders, all behind the
firewalls of ciphers and secrecy classifications that diplomats assume to be
secure. The leaked cables range up to the "SECRET NOFORN" level, which means
they are meant never to be shown to non-US citizens.
As well as conventional political analyses, some of the cables contain detailed
accounts of corruption by foreign regimes, as well as intelligence on
undercover arms shipments, human trafficking and sanction-busting efforts by
would-be nuclear states such as Iran and Libya. Some are based on interviews
with local sources while others are general impressions and briefings written
for top state department visitors who may be unfamiliar with local nuances.
Intended to be read by officials in Washington up to the level of the secretary
of state, the cables are generally drafted by the ambassador or subordinates.
Although their contents are often startling and troubling, the cables are
unlikely to gratify conspiracy theorists. They do not contain evidence of
assassination plots, CIA bribery or such criminal enterprises as the
Iran-Contra scandal in the Reagan years, when anti-Nicaraguan guerrillas were
covertly financed.
One reason may be that America's most sensitive "top secret" and above foreign
intelligence files cannot be accessed from Siprnet, the defence department
network involved.
The US military believes it knows where the leak originated. A soldier, Bradley
Manning, 22, has been held in solitary confinement for the last seven months
and is facing a court martial in the new year. The former intelligence analyst
is charged with unauthorised downloads of classified material while serving on
an army base outside Baghdad. He is suspected of taking copies not only of the
state department archive, but also of video of an Apache helicopter crew
gunning down civilians in Baghdad, and hundreds of thousands of daily war logs
from military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It was childishly easy, according to the published chatlog of a conversation
Manning had with a fellow-hacker. "I would come in with music on a CD-RW
labelled with something like 'Lady Gaga'
erase the music
then write a
compressed split file. No one suspected a thing ... [I] listened and
lip-synched to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest
data spillage in American history." He said that he "had unprecedented access
to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months".
Manning told his correspondent Adrian Lamo, who subsequently denounced him to
the authorities: "Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the
world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find
an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable
format, to the public ... Everywhere there's a US post, there's a diplomatic
scandal that will be revealed. Worldwide anarchy in CSV format ... It's
beautiful, and horrifying."
He added: "Information should be free. It belongs in the public domain."
Manning, according to the chatlogs, says he uploaded the copies to WikiLeaks,
the "freedom of information activists" as he called them, led by Australian
former hacker Julian Assange.
Assange and his circle apparently decided against immediately making the cables
public. Instead they embarked on staged disclosure of the other material
aimed, as they put it on their website, at "maximising political impact".
In April at a Washington press conference the group released the Apache
helicopter video, titling it Collateral Murder.
The Guardian's Nick Davies brokered an agreement with Assange to hand over in
advance two further sets of military field reports on Iraq and Afghanistan so
professional journalists could analyse them. Published earlier this year
simultaneously with the New York Times and Der Spiegel in Germany, the analyses
revealed that coalition forces killed civilians in previously unreported
shootings and handed over prisoners to be tortured.
The revelations shot Assange and WikiLeaks to global prominence but led to
angry denunciations from the Pentagon and calls from extreme rightwingers in
the US that Assange be arrested or even assassinated. This month Sweden issued
an international warrant for Assange, for questioning about alleged sexual
assaults. His lawyer says the allegations spring from unprotected but otherwise
consensual sex with two women.
WikiLeaks says it is now planning to post a selection of the cables. Meanwhile,
a Guardian team of expert writers has been spending months combing through the
data. Freedom of information campaigner Heather Brooke obtained a copy of the
database through her own contacts and joined the Guardian team. The paper is to
publish independently, but simultaneously with the New York Times and Der
Spiegel, along with Le Monde in Paris and El País in Madrid. As on previous
occasions the Guardian is redacting information likely to cause reprisals
against vulnerable individuals.
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