by Kim Ghattas
The secretary didn’t try to ignore the issue, pretend it didn’t matter, or reject responsibility because the cable had been written by someone else during another administration. This was a failure of America, and she was angry too. She tried as best she could to explain the context of each cable, why it had been written, what was the background. But mostly she tried to empathize with her interlocutors as a politician. I get it, she would say. I know how you feel. I too have suffered slings and arrows. Russia’s Sergei Lavrov waved WikiLeaks away; he just wanted to get down to business. In Moscow, even ultranationalist Russians who loved to badmouth the United States were surprisingly dismissive of the leak. The foreign minister of Kazakhstan was delighted to find out he was important enough to be the subject of an American cable detailing his nightlife and restaurant habits; he said it was great publicity. From Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili to Britain’s deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, Clinton diligently calmed upset egos and gave reassurance about steady alliances.
After their private talks with Clinton, the ministers went away, somewhat appeased. But one man wanted a public apology. Italy’s flamboyant prime minister Silvio Berlusconi gave Hillary an impassioned presentation about how much he loved America and why it was so painful for him to read the cables. He had brought her a gift: silk scarves from Naples’s famous E. Marinella artisans. He told her about his father, who used to take him to the cemetery to see the graves of American soldiers who had fought and died to liberate Italy in World War II and how it had cemented his love for America. Clinton was not exactly an admirer of the Italian leader as a person, with his reputation for raunchy parties and allegations of sex with underage girls. But she felt bad for Berlusconi the politician, who had been such an ally for the United States. I will stand here with you, she told him. We will bring the cameras, and I will convey our gratitude to Italy and to you personally for what you have done for our relationship. An e-mail was sent around to the traveling press corps alerting us that Clinton was about to make a statement. The camera crew, photographers, and a couple of reporters hurried into the room.
“The United States highly values the relationship that we have with the prime minister and with Italy,” said Clinton. “We have no better friend, we have no one who supports the American policies as consistently as Prime Minister Berlusconi has, starting in the Clinton administration, through the Bush administration, and now the Obama administration.”
We have no better friend—how many times did American officials say that about a country? Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, India, the Philippines, South Korea. A montage of statements by Obama and Clinton, and by all their predecessors, praising different countries as America’s best friend, would be an entertaining comedy sketch. And yet it was a sought-after mention that revealed each country’s neuroses and insecurities. The publication of the cables seemed to have sent the world into a tizzy, as people everywhere pored over them, eager to find out whether they had made the cut and what America really thought of them in private. Were they in fact America’s best friend?
Washingtonians are often mocked for what is called the “index read,” a quick scan through the index to find one’s name. Find the relevant paragraphs, read them to determine how you’re portrayed, maybe check the index for names of friends and see how they come across, derive pleasure if you come out looking better. Don’t bother buying the book if you’re not in the index.
WikiLeaks was the State Department’s “Unabridged Guide to the World: Our Relationship with Every Country and Quirks of World Leaders.” The globe did a quick “index scan.” Which country got the most mentions? Which came out most favorably? Which close ally was actually being disparaged in diplomatic cables? What did American diplomats think of this world leader? Countries kept a score board: they complained that their information was being revealed and took comfort from the fact that their country was cited most often.
Zauresh Batalova, the head of a local NGO in Astana, was waiting excitedly for a meeting with Clinton when I asked her what she thought about the leak.
“The cables are a confirmation that America is still a global leader in geopolitical affairs,” she told me. A simple but astute observation that made me wonder whether any other country had diplomats sending cables from every single world capital. China? Possibly. But America, whether in decline or not, clearly still had a finger in every imaginable pie.
The reaction to the “dump” in different countries was also very telling of their national personality. China blocked Internet access to anything WikiLeaks. The cables could not be read by average Chinese citizens in a country where the media were tightly controlled. The content would reveal too much about their government’s workings and corrupt the minds of the people. In Pakistan, members of the cabinet angrily dismissed the leaks as a conspiracy against the country and an attempt to undermine the political and military leadership. A few days later, someone in Pakistan planted fake cables in which American diplomats heaped praise over Pakistan’s military while attacking India, describing its military as vain, egotistical, and genocidal. When the hoax was revealed, some newspapers apologized quickly to their readers but others, like the Nation, which had so shocked me during our visit to Pakistan with its rabid coverage, continued for days to print articles about “India’s True Face.”
* * *
On Thursday, we left our hotel in Astana at seven in the morning, driving through deserted streets, white with snow. SAM was having trouble getting deiced, and our departure was slightly delayed. We flew south to Kyrgyzstan. Clinton met the president, gave a press conference, spent an hour with students in a town hall, greeted the U.S. embassy staff, and then we went to Manas Air Base, where she shook hands with American troops. We got back on the plane and flew another hour west to the warmer temperatures and repression of Uzbekistan. We spent a few hours being stared at by menacing government goons in black leather jackets who looked more Soviet than the Russians. Clinton sat down with the local dictator Islam Karimov for one of those meetings where values had lost out to national interest. The United States worried about relying too much on Pakistan as a route in and out of Afghanistan. Uzbekistan bordered Afghanistan too and provided an alternative—Hillary would have to pinch her nose. She would make up for it by meeting with civil society representatives in the embassy. Four hours after landing in Tashkent, SAM took us on a five-hour ride southwest to Bahrain. We landed in Manama just before midnight local time. In Astana, where we had started that morning under the snow in twenty degrees Fahrenheit, it was already three in the morning. We shed our coats, gloves, and hats and walked down the steps onto the tarmac and into Bahrain’s balmy sixty-degree weather.
The flight had given me some more time to delve into the WikiLeaks cables, which were turning into the foreign policy equivalent of a gossip column. As I skimmed through the batch that had been published so far, a theme emerged: everybody still relied on the United States to sort out their problems. Countries and world leaders didn’t just want America’s attention or another photo opportunity; they somehow expected action. While the United States was struggling to advance its own agenda, other countries were waiting for it to help them with theirs. The cables showed the extent to which the Arabs feared Iran’s rise as a nuclear power but refused to say so in public—because what scared them even more than Iran was the reaction of their own people if they were exposed trying to bring America’s wrath onto another Muslim country. Instead, they privately called on the United States to “cut off the head of the snake,” in the words of the Saudi official ambassador to the United States Adel el-Jubeir, who was quoting the king himself. If America did attack Iran, the same Arab leaders would publicly curse the imperialistic American warmongers. Pakistan’s leaders called for more American drone strikes in private and then protested against it in the National Assembly. Yemen’s president Ali Abdullah Saleh did the opposite: he wanted more American drone strikes against militants from al-Qaeda who were challenging h
is grip on power. In public, he pretended the Yemeni army was carrying out the attacks so he could look like a strong leader and avoid anti-American protests that would strengthen the militants. In Bahrain, Hillary had also for the first time said she would not serve a second term as secretary of state. She wanted to step out of the limelight and said she was done with the high wire of politics. Her statement dominated the headlines at home, even if no one believed her.
On the endless journey back to Washington, at the end of a weeklong trip, I battled jetlag by reading more cables. They were a treasure trove for historians. I couldn’t believe it when I read that even China seemed to want the United States to do its bidding. The Chinese appeared increasingly worried about North Korea’s reckless behavior but refused to criticize it openly, hoping instead that the United States would continue to flex its muscle with military exercises in the region, enough to scare Pyongyang into submission and cool tempers on the Korean peninsula. I suddenly realized that on that flight out of Seoul in the summer, while my colleagues and I had been dismissive of the administration’s official line that China was being helpful on a few issues, there was actually some truth in what American diplomats were telling us. China wasn’t about to ditch North Korea, but it appreciated a bit of American help keeping the crazy Dear Leader in check.
There were a lot of juicy details about the habits of foreign leaders but no real surprises—there was no sign of coups being fomented or secret supplies of weapons no one had ever heard of before. The gap between what America said it did these days and what its diplomats were actually doing seemed rather narrow. The cables showed a superpower at work, cajoling, pleading, reassuring, and bullying. American diplomats came across as sharp-eyed and earnest, detailing the corruption of the Tunisian regime, the frustrating pace of almost nonexistent reforms in Egypt, or the lavish lifestyles of various dictators around the world. They were also hard at work advancing their country’s interests, detailing China’s growing influence in Africa and access to resources there or reporting on the ties between Beijing and Islamabad. The biggest gap was between what foreign leaders said in public to their own people and what they said in private to American diplomats.
Obviously, the American cables were of the lowest classification category. They were not top secret, they were not CIA missives; even senior officials in the Building admitted they didn’t know everything their government was involved in. People suspected there were covert operations to sow unrest in Iran. American officials would soon openly acknowledge the use of drones, but it was already an open secret. American newspapers had long uncovered CIA rendition flights and black holes where suspects were being interrogated. This was not the age of the Pentagon Papers of the 1960s, which, once revealed, showed that the U.S. government had consistently and systematically lied to Congress and to the public about decision making during the Vietnam War.
Italy’s foreign minister Franco Frattini had emphatically declared that the leak was the 9/11 of diplomacy. There was indeed less openness in conversations with American diplomats perhaps for a while, and dissidents in repressive countries shied away from contacting American officials, but overall, Secretary Gates laconically summed up why diplomacy wouldn’t change all that much: the United States was too big to ignore.
“The fact is governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets.” The cables showed the web of connections, ties, alliances, and partnerships that the United States had had around the world for decades. Over the last two years, almost imperceptibly but very methodically, the Obama administration and Clinton in particular had been working to strengthen and build on that foundation to make sure the United States remained the indispensable partner of the twenty-first century.
For the months to come, every time the administration made a statement or staked a position, everybody would rush to compare that to what American officials had said about the issue in their classified documents, to see how big or small the gap was between public and private statements. The WikiLeaks cables became part of the furniture. New cables kept being published, and Hillary continued to make calls well into the following spring, a spring that brought its own share of momentous events.
PART III
The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something.
—Gamal Abdel Nasser, 1957
12
I WANT TO BREAK THROUGH
I wanted to ignore the tweet, but something about it grabbed my attention. I had spent Christmas of 2010 with my family in Beirut, and life by the Mediterranean was a slow, languorous affair of lunches, dinners, and socializing over coffee in between. I was having a hard time stepping back into the fast-paced, BlackBerry-driven world of Washington politics. Just four days into the new year, the news was already speeding ahead: the Ivory Coast was slowly imploding, the Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi was in town, and Clinton had just issued a statement condemning the assassination of Punjab governor Salman Taseer, shot dead by his bodyguard in Lahore. Hillary also called his wife, Aamna, to extend condolences to her and her children. They talked about the time they’d all met in Lahore in October 2009, and Hillary relayed how much she’d admired Taseer’s work to promote tolerance. Taseer was a staunch liberal and had spoken out forcefully against a law that punished blasphemy with death. His positions had cost him his life; the bodyguard would later say he had shot the governor because he was an “apostate.” Pakistan’s unending problems remained a headache for Washington. As usual, my editors in London wanted to know Washington’s reaction to everything.
I wanted to ignore it, but the tweeter was persistent: Why was the White House not saying anything about Tunisia? I was puzzled. Tunisia? The small North African country hadn’t been on my radar recently, and I was intrigued by this tweeter reaching out to America the only way he knew how. I did a quick search on the news from Tunisia. Protests had been spreading slowly since December 19, when a twenty-six-year-old man, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire in the southern town of Sidi Bouzid. Bouazizi had been the provider for his mother and six younger siblings and he struggled to make enough money as a fruit and vegetable vendor. Humiliated repeatedly by the police, who pushed him around and confiscated his cart, he had preferred self-immolation to a life with no hope. It was an iconic, powerful gesture for anyone, but especially for a Muslim whose religion forbade suicide. Few people were paying attention. Bouazizi’s gesture had barely received any mention in the media. I had been 1,500 miles away on the same seashore just a few days ago, and no one had mentioned Tunisia. Protests in the Arab world erupted occasionally, then fizzled out with no further impact but never before in Tunisia, a tightly policed country that had had only two presidents since gaining its independence from France in 1956. The current ruler Zin el-Abidine Ben Ali had been in power for twenty years, oblivious to his people’s misery.
Bouazizi had just died in the hospital from his wounds, and I asked @ferjani9arwi why he wanted the White House to say anything. “US must stand up for people’s rights” came the reply “US silence = more people killed and imprisoned.” But would it really matter if Washington spoke? Another tweeter from Tunisia, @samieleuch, said, “For religious people, nothing happens without the will of God. For secular people, nothing happens without the will of the US.”
At the State Department briefing on that January 4, I raised my hand to ask a question.
“On Tunisia, there’s continued, sort of, civil unrest there, and I was just wondering…”
“What country?”
“Tunisia. Tunisia. And I was wondering what you made of the situation there.”
P. J. rifled through his binder. Nothing.
“Actually, I didn’t get updated on Tunisia today. So we’ll save that question.”
Matt from AP chim
ed in, laughing.
“When was the last time you did get updated on Tunisia?”
The following day, we asked again. P. J. had an update. He told us the United States was concerned about economic inequality in the country, and the embassy warden had issued a message to American citizens in the country warning them about the unrest. By January 6, the State Department had summoned the Tunisian ambassador, and Jeff Feltman protested the use of force against the demonstrators. The Tunisian authorities were also hacking into their citizens’ Facebook and Twitter accounts, for which they were harshly criticized by the State Department. In Europe, there was a very different reaction. The French foreign minister Michèle Alliot-Marie offered to send French riot police to help quell the unrest in France’s old colonial backyard. Tunisia continued to simmer, but no one quite knew what to make of the protestors—and they were competing for headlines in the news. On January 8 in Tucson, Arizona, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head by a lone gunman whose bullets killed six others. The world was also watching the birth of a new country as South Sudan got ready to secede from Sudan. SAM was waiting for us again.