by Kim Ghattas
* * *
Bradley Manning, the young army private in Iraq suspected of having been the source of the leak, had been arrested in the spring. Officials at the State Department were furious that their confidential cables had been disclosed, especially by someone who had no business reading them. The United States had tried to encourage more openness within the government after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Lack of communication between different agencies was one of the reasons why no one had been able to connect the different warning signs. A new system called SIPRNet meant that State Department and Pentagon officials could read some of their respective classified correspondence. The cables were missives written by American diplomats posted around the world and sent back to the Building. They contained accounts of their conversations with local officials or dissidents and analysis of the political situation in a country or the stability of a regime. The content helped provide other officials involved in foreign policy decision making with a more nuanced perspective about various issues. But Foreign Service officers wondered why a lowly soldier in Iraq should be given access to accounts of the conversation between General David Petraeus and Yemen’s president in Sana’a, or cables from the American embassy in London giving Hillary a background briefing about British politics before her visit?
In the Building, no one knew exactly which cables had been leaked. Moods swung wildly from dismay to disbelief—surely it couldn’t be that bad. The CIA had set up an investigation into the leak called “Wikileaks Task Force” and its unfortunate acronym—WTF—aptly summarized how people felt. Top officials like Jeff and Kurt worked with their sections and with American embassies in their region to identify which cables might become public and what damage their content might cause, not only to America’s relationships with other countries but also to the secretary herself. As the days went on, the magnitude of the problem became clear. This was going to be a long-term crisis, and it wasn’t something that ambassadors or assistant secretaries of state could fix alone. The top tier of the Obama administration would have to help with the damage control. Ambassadors in capitals around the world called foreign ministers to warn them of the crisis that was about to unfold.
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
Se
nt: 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, Davutoğlu, 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.
Davutoğlu, 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.” Davutoğlu had been an advisor to the prime minister at the time. Erdoğan 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. Davutoğlu 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.
* * *
On Wednesday morning in Astana, the Apology Tour, as we had dubbed the trip, was about to enter full swing. The day started with a family photo of all the leaders attending the summit. Hillary looked relaxed and chatted comfortably with those around her. Almost none of them had escaped unscathed from the acerbic or humorous descriptions by America’s diplomats. In the massive hall, the tall, lanky advance line officer took one step forward to stand out of the crowd of photographers and cameramen. He stood next to the ex
it and made eye contact with Clinton. She started walking toward him. Her aides and Fred followed. Line officers always made sure something about them stood out—a tie, a colorful handbag, something Clinton could spot so she could find her way to her next appointment with no awkward wild hand waves and without ever looking lost.
Every day, Huma briefed Clinton about the schedule. Hillary’s cordovan leather-bound daily briefing book also contained the “truncated briefing checklists” with the detailed scenarios of every event she was to attend, but the secretary didn’t devote much energy trying to retain or worry about the details of the logistics, as long as she got the big picture. Over the years, since her days as First Lady in Arkansas, she had learned to turn off the part of her brain that asked, “Where do I go now?” or “Have we sorted out lunch?” and “Where will I sit?” This was the only way she could devote her full attention to the content and substance of an eighteen-hour day like this conference in Astana, with eleven different events and a handful of one-on-ones.
Hillary trusted those around her and relied on them to help her glide through her heavy schedule, and her easygoing social nature allowed her to manage herself on the rare occasions when the system failed her for a few minutes. She rearranged people’s positions for pictures, laughed at her own missteps, and filled in awkward silences with shy activists or, in this case, world leaders with bruised egos.
International summits were an intense intellectual effort, juggling all the different issues at the heart of the gathering and then the multitude of bilateral meetings that counterparts always requested. At the yearly General Assembly at the UN, Clinton participated on average in sixty meetings and events, multilateral or bilateral, alone or with the president, over the course of about five days. It required an exceptional level of mental multitasking to keep all the countries and their issues straight. The OSCE was much smaller, but the list of bilateral meetings was growing, and no matter what other pressing issues had to be resolved, every meeting would start with the WikiLeaks talk. There was some guesswork involved as well: WikiLeaks was releasing cables by dribs and drabs, and the State Department was not entirely certain of every missive in Assange’s possession. Clinton kept some of her conversations very general, careful not to draw attention to content that may never become public.