Authors: Kim Ghattas
The call came around mid-November. Top editors from the
New York Times
informed the White House that they had been given access to the cables. WikiLeaks
was working with international news organizations to spread its treasure trove over
front pages everywhere. State Department officials pleaded and pushed for the cables
not to be revealed. But WikiLeaks and the newspapers did not budge. The Building decided
to cooperate with the media organizations publishing the documents to make sure that
while a light was shone on the inner workings of the American foreign policy machine,
no one got killed in the process. American diplomats everywhere spoke to dissidents,
human rights activists, opposition politicians; it was critical that their names be
redacted from the documents or their lives could be at risk. Julian Assange, the bleached-blond
Australian behind WikiLeaks, was initially opposed to the redactions. He told Declan
Walsh from the
New York Times
that he saw those who spoke to American diplomats as “informants” who’d had it coming
to them if they got killed.
31
The leaks were going to be made public sometime during the Thanksgiving weekend.
* * *
Hillary was spending the Thanksgiving holiday with her family at their New York State
home in Chappaqua. She had left D.C. on Tuesday evening, on a commercial flight as
always, with two DS agents assigned to protect her. In the Building, on the road,
aboard SAM, Hillary was always on the phone to leaders around the world. She sometimes
walked around the seventh floor with her earpiece in her right ear, catching up, finalizing
details of an agreement, or touching base before an upcoming visit. I’d seen firsthand
how Clinton schmoozed. I’d watched her position herself at the heart of the world’s
community of foreign policy deciders and experts and become the connector. Just as
Washington sat at the heart of a web of connections tying it to the world, Hillary
was a center of gravity to herself. From the day she took office, she had worked hard
to be available to her counterparts, both because she believed in being accessible
but also because availability was political capital. Her personal contacts with ministers,
presidents, and princes, either recent or decades-old, meant there was a huge amount
of bandwidth that allowed for communications not to clog up or break down when a major
crisis erupted.
Kissinger believed that “it’s very important to establish relationships before you
need anything, so that there is a measure of respect in negotiations once they occur
or when a crisis develops. When you travel as secretary, one problem you have is that
the press comes with you and wants an immediate result because it justifies their
trip. And sometimes the best result is that you don’t try to get a result but try
to get an understanding for the next time you go to them.”
Now Hillary was coming to her counterparts to ask for understanding. She took her
task very seriously. It was unclear how other countries would react to the content
of the cables, and she believed that the best way to soften the blow was to use her
own charm and appeal. Presidents and foreign ministers expect to hear from me personally,
she said, and she got to work. It was important to make sure the apologies were not
mishandled or it could compound the problem. She knew she wasn’t going to do this
alone. Others were making calls too, from the president to the vice president, to
the secretary of defense. Everybody called their counterparts or the people they knew
best.
At 6:31 in the evening of November 24, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Hillary
sat down in her study on the second floor of her Chappaqua home for the first call
of the holiday weekend. The study was fitted with a secure line and the State Department’s
Operations Center (OPS) connected her to the Japanese foreign minister Seiji Maehara.
It was 8:31 in the morning on Thursday in Tokyo. They spoke for about fifteen minutes.
At 6:48, another call—this time to the Korean foreign minister Kim Sung-Hwan. Then
Kevin Rudd, the Australian foreign minister. The cables were not public yet, and it
wasn’t clear how much the media organizations would print, so Hillary was doing some
candid but cautious preemptive diplomacy. There was no point divulging too many details
over the phone. In later conversations with lower-ranking officials, Rudd would erupt
furiously. He had been described as abrasive, impulsive, and a control freak in the
cables that were splashed on the front pages of Australian newspapers. He blamed the
American government for the leaks, not WikiLeak’s founder, Julian Assange, and said
there were real questions about America’s security system.
Thursday was sacred turkey and family day. There would be no calls. The flurry started
again in earnest on Friday at 7:00 in the morning with a call to China. The OPS center
sent e-mail alerts to officials at the various echelons of the Building. The content
ranged from breaking news to must-read newspaper articles. Notifications about the
secretary’s phone calls were sent to a handful of her closest aides. All day, the
e-mails dropped, one after the other.
07:33: The Secretary is speaking with Emirati FM al Nahyan.
07:37: The Secretary is speaking with Abu Dhabi Crown Prince al Nahyan.
08:17: The Secretary is speaking with German FM Westerwelle.
(He had been described in the cables as anti-American, a burden on U.S.-German relations,
an exuberant wild card who had none of his own ideas to solve international problems.)
09:01: The Secretary is speaking with French FM Alliot-Marie.
(Her president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was an “emperor with no clothes.”)
On and on it went. There was other business to be dealt with as well, but WikiLeaks
dominated the day. Saturday brought some light relief. Just after 9:00 in the morning,
Clinton spoke to the Canadian foreign minister Lawrence Cannon. Don’t worry, Hillary,
he told her. You should see what we say about you guys.
On Sunday, everybody was poised for the release; it was being called a “dump” of cables,
and it was expected to start at 3:00 in the afternoon. But just before lunch, an e-mail
flashed on Hillary’s BlackBerry.
From: Ops Alert
Sent: Sunday, November 28, 2010 1:10PM
Subject: First Wikileaks articles appear in Jerusalem Post and Der Spiegel
At approximately 1305, the Jerusalem Post and Der Spiegel published articles with
multiple sensitive quotes from the State Department cables referencing world leaders.
The Jerusalem Post says it is quoting from the Der Spiegel article.
Hillary started working the phones again. She had to have the same conversation over
and over. It was one thing to deal with a problem in one conversation and then move
on to another set of issues in the next meeting. But when she was done with one conversation,
there was a long line of people still waiting to have the exact same conversation.
Regardless of how she handled it and whether her interlocutor was appeased, she had
to tango all over again with every leader she spoke to, in the same way or a bit differently,
repeatedly. There was no blanket apology, no conference call, and no meeting to be
held at the UN for a mea culpa speech. The next best thing, as it conveniently happened,
was Hillary’s upcoming trip: a conference of the Organization for Security and Co-operation
of Europe.
* * *
We were leaving that Monday afternoon for another whirlwind tour, starting with the
OSCE summit in Astana, Kazakhstan. Dozens of leaders would be in attendance, all of
whom had been mentioned in at least one cable, from Germany’s “Teflon” Angela Merkel,
to the “feckless” Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister. It would be a long day
of contrition, without the buffer of a phone line and hundreds of miles of distance.
Before boarding SAM, Hillary would have the opportunity to hone her approach for the
face-to-face WikiLeaks conversations with the representative of a prickly, proud country,
the subject of some seven thousand cables.
Turkey’s foreign minister, Davuto
ğ
lu, had long been scheduled for a visit to Washington. There was, as always, much
to discuss, but now WikiLeaks caused serious upset for the proud Turks. The number
of missives relating to Ankara seemed disproportionate, a sign of both how important
Turkey was to the United States and how worried Washington had been about some of
its ally’s actions.
Davuto
ğ
lu, whose efforts to transform Turkey into an indispensable broker had gone awry that
spring, had been described in a 2004 cable as an “exceptionally dangerous Islamist”
with “delusions of empire.” Davuto
ğ
lu had been an advisor to the prime minister at the time. Erdo
ğ
an himself was being lacerated in the cables as a man with unbridled ambition who
believed God had anointed him to lead Turkey. Luckily, these cables had been written
under a previous administration, so there was comfortable distance with their author.
But Clinton still spent forty-five minutes alone with the man she had worked so hard
to befriend in an effort to reassure him that the Obama administration valued its
friendship with Turkey. They sat in her office at the State Department, just the two
of them, while their staff waited outside. The Turks, who had been considering bringing
their paper-based diplomatic communication system fully into the twenty-first century,
quipped that perhaps it was best to stick to methods of communications that were less
vulnerable to problems like WikiLeaks. Davuto
ğ
lu liked Clinton and prized his relationship with her. He was quick to state very
publicly that the cables would not affect Turkey’s relationship with the United States.
Beyond the hurt feelings of world leaders, the Building worried about dissidents,
activists, or even confidential sources whose names might not be redacted or who could
be identified from the context of the cables. A matrix was created to identify vulnerable
subjects around the world. Most people told U.S. officials who contacted them that
their government already knew about them so there was no reason to worry. In some
cases, though they were known to the authorities, the content of the cables provided
details of sensitive conversations and tipped the balance against them so they asked
to be spirited out of the country and elaborate planning was required to construct
a valid, innocuous reason for them to leave. In some cases, officials concluded that
contacting certain people to ask if they needed help would only endanger them further.
In China, where information was so scarce and access to insiders so difficult to attain,
the revelations were damaging to diplomats’ sources. Even journalists or professors
with a modicum of knowledge about the inner workings of the Communist Party risked
their jobs by sharing that information with outsiders.
For everyone involved, this was a breach of trust, albeit one that the United States
had not intended. Would anyone ever speak to an American diplomat candidly again?
The cables were being read as bibles of U.S. foreign policy when they were not. They
were observations at one point in time about the situation in a specific country,
which informed decision making in Washington. In fact, ambassadors complained that
their missives to headquarters often ended up in the recycling bin. The State Department
did not confirm that the WikiLeaks documents were indeed its classified diplomatic
cables—a necessary diplomatic charade. Everyone knew the cables were real, but there
was no need to confirm it publicly. Clinton and other officials referred to “alleged”
stolen cables.
Anyone who fought against government secrecy or resented American influence hailed
the leak as a great event. Enemies hoped it was a fatal blow to the imperial hegemonic
power, another marker on the downhill trajectory of a country in decline. Rivals and
even some friends greeted the event with a degree of glee—invincible America was not
so invincible after all. There was also widespread disbelief: mighty America can’t
keep its secrets safe? Mostly, it was seen as a blow to U.S. prestige and power. Clinton,
who had given a tough and widely applauded speech about Internet freedom earlier in
the year, rejected the notion that the leak was about freedom of expression or access
to information. After her morning meeting with the Turks, she called a small press
conference in the Treaty Room.
“I am aware that some may mistakenly applaud those responsible, so I want to set the
record straight. There is nothing laudable about endangering innocent people, and
there is nothing brave about sabotaging the peaceful relations between nations on
which our common security depends,” she said. “There have been examples in history
in which official conduct has been made public in the name of exposing wrongdoings
or misdeeds. This is not one of those cases.”
Instead of heading to Andrews Air Force Base ahead of the secretary as usual, we first
filed our stories about her statement from our offices in the bull pen on the second
floor. Then we piled into the vans and drove with her motorcade to be reunited with
SAM, just after two in the afternoon, under a sunny blue December sky. The classified
books had already been laid out for the delegation, and Lew had overseen the loading
of our luggage. We did our seating lottery rapidly on the tarmac and embarked.
* * *
We were flying east, into the future, across eleven time zones. After sixteen hours,
we arrived in snowy Astana late in the afternoon on Tuesday. As we rode to our hotel
in overheated vans, our eyes widened at the sights produced by Kazakhstan’s recent
oil wealth: this really was the future. World-renowned architects had been commissioned
to design buildings to populate the capital’s sparse skyline. The result of their
unbridled creativity included a purple yurt-shaped structure by British architect
Norman Foster, which was actually a mall, featuring a fake sandy beach with palm trees.
There was a building in the shape of a rocket and another that was described in our
hotel city guide as the “most arrogant” building of the capital. No one could figure
out where the translation had gone wrong. The city also had a replica of the White
House, but with a blue dome and golden spire on top, sitting on Astana’s own, tiled
version of the National Mall.