WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

The biggest leak in history

Cyberspace

30 November 2010

“It is the historian’s dream. It is the diplomat’s nightmare”

TIMOTHY GARTON ASH, HISTORIAN

What did we learn from WikiLeaks? The question, as with virtually everything else to do with the leaks, was polarising. There was, from the start, a metropolitan yawn from bien pensants who felt they knew it all. Arabs don’t like Iran? The Russian government is corrupt? Some African countries are kleptocracies? Go on, astonish us. You’ll be telling us next that the pope is Catholic.

According to this critique the disclosures stated the obvious, and amounted to no more than “humdrum diplomatic pillow talk”. (This was from the London Review of Books. Academic Glen Newey said he was unimpressed by the revelation that French leader Nicolas Sarkozy “is a short man with a Napoleon complex”.)

Then there were the people who argued that the cables did not reveal enough bad behaviour by Americans. On the left this was a cause for disappointment – and, sometimes, suspicion. A small cabal began poring over the cables for evidence of ideological editing or censorship. And why so little on Israel? On the right, and from government, this served as fuel for the argument that there was no public interest in publication. This was not the Pentagon papers, they reasoned. There was little malfeasance in American foreign policy revealed in the documents, so where’s the justification for revealing all? Then there was the US government’s insistence that the leaks were endangering lives, wrecking Washington’s ability to do business with its allies and partners, and helping terrorists.

What these arguments missed was the hunger for the cables in countries that didn’t have fully functioning democracies or the sort of free expression enjoyed in London, Paris or New York. Within hours of the first cables being posted the Guardian started receiving a steady stream of pleading requests from editors and journalists around the world wanting to know what the cables revealed about their own countries and rulers. It was easier to call the revelations unstartling, dull even, if one lived in western Europe, rather than in Belarus, Tunisia, or in any other oppressive regime.

This was as powerful a case for the WikiLeaks disclosures as any. It was not particularly edifying to see western commentators and politicians decrying the public interest in the publication of information which was being avidly, even desperately, sought after by people in far off countries of which they doubtless knew little. Who was to say what effect these disclosures would have, even if, on one level, they were revealing things that were in some sense known? The very fact of publication often served as authentication and verification of things that were suspected.

In fact, far from being routine, the leak was unprecedented, if only in size. WikiLeaks called it, accurately, “the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain”. There were 251,287 internal state department communiqués, written by 280 embassies and consulates in 180 different countries. Among them were frank, and often unflattering, assessments of world leaders; analysis, much of it good quality; as well as comments, reports of meetings, summations, and gossip. There were accounts of vodka-fuelled dinners, meetings with oligarchs, encounters in Chinese restaurants and even that Saudi Arabian sex party. Some cables were long essays, offering fresh thinking on historically knotty problems, such as Chechnya; others simple requests to Washington.

They highlighted the geopolitical interests and preoccupations of the US superpower: nuclear proliferation; the supposed threat from Iran; the hard-to-control military situation in Kabul and Islamabad. The American embassy cables came from established power centres (London and Paris) but also the far-off margins (Ashgabat, Yerevan and Bishkek). Boring they are not. On the contrary, they offer an incomparably detailed mosaic of life and politics in the early 21st century.

But more importantly than this, they included disclosures of things citizens are entitled to know. This is true for Americans and non-Americans. The cables discussed human rights abuses, corruption, and dubious financial ties between G8 leaders. They spoke of corporate espionage, dirty tricks and hidden bank accounts. In their private exchanges US diplomats dispense with the platitudes that characterise much of their public job; they give relatively frank, unmediated assessments, offering a window into the mental processes at the top of US power. The cables were, in a way, the truth.

The constant principle that underpinned the Guardian’s selection – what to print and what not – was whether a cable contained material that was in the larger public interest. Nowhere was this more clear-cut than with a classified directive from July 2009 that revealed the US government was spying on the United Nations, and its low-key South Korean secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. The cable began by requesting predictable diplomatic information about positions and views on hot topics such as Darfur, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea. But read more closely it clearly blurred the line between diplomacy and spying.

The directive from Washington asked for sensitive communications information – passwords, encryption codes. It called for detailed biometric information “on key UN officials, to include undersecretaries, heads of specialised agencies and their chief advisers, top SYG [secretary general] aides, heads of peace operations and political field missions, including force commanders”, as well as intelligence on Ban’s “management and decision-making style and his influence on the secretariat”. Washington also wanted credit card numbers, email addresses, phone, fax and pager numbers and frequent-flyer account numbers for UN figures. It was also after “biographic and biometric information on UN security council permanent representatives”.

The “national human intelligence collection directive” was distributed to US missions at the UN in New York, Vienna and Rome; and to 33 embassies and consulates, including those in London, Paris and Moscow. All of Washington’s main intelligence agencies – the CIA’s clandestine service, the US Secret Service and the FBI – as well as the state department, were circulated with these “reporting and collection needs”.

The UN has long been the victim of bugging and espionage operations. Veteran diplomats are used to conducting their most sensitive discussions outside its walls, and not everyone was surprised at the disclosures. Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer in the Middle East, remarked: “There is a reason the CIA station is usually next door to the political section in our embassies. There are ambassadors who love that stuff. In the American system it sloshes over from side to side.”

But the cable – signed “CLINTON” – illuminated a cynical spying campaign. American diplomatic staff enjoy immunity and can operate without suspicion. The British historian and Guardian columnist Timothy Garton Ash was one of many disturbed by the directive. Garton Ash remarked that “regular American diplomats are being asked to do stuff you would normally expect of low-level spooks”.

Experts on international law were also affronted. The cable seemed to show the US breaching three of the founding treaties of the UN. Ban’s spokesman, Farhan Haq, sent off a letter reminding member states to respect the UN’s inviolability: “The UN charter, the headquarters agreement and the 1946 convention contain provisions relating to the privileges and immunities of the organisation. The UN relies on the adherence by member states to these various undertakings.”

The American cables held numerous other secrets that it was right to disclose in the public interest. Memo after memo from US stations across the Middle East exposed widespread behind-the-scenes pressures to contain President Ahmadinejad’s Iran, which the US, Arab states and Israel believed to be close to acquiring nuclear weapons. Startlingly, the cables showed King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia urging the United States to attack Iran to destroy its nuclear programme. Other Arab allies, too, had secretly been agitating for military action against Tehran. Bombing Iranian nuclear facilities had hitherto been publicly viewed as a desperate last resort that could ignite a far wider war – one that was not seriously on anyone’s diplomatic table except possibly that of the Israelis.

The Saudi king was recorded as having “frequently exhorted the US to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons programme”. He “told you [Americans] to cut off the head of the snake”, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, said, according to a report on Abdullah’s meeting with the US general David Petraeus in April 2008.

The cables further highlighted Israel’s anxiety to preserve its regional nuclear monopoly, its readiness to go it alone against Iran – and its relentless attempts to influence American policy. The defence minister, Ehud Barak, claimed, for example, in June 2009, that there was a window of “between six and 18 months from now in which stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons might still be viable”. Thereafter, Barak said, “any military solution would result in unacceptable collateral damage”.

The true scale also emerged of America’s covert military involvement in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest nation. Washington’s concern that Yemen has become a haven for Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (Aqap) was understandable. The group had carried out a series of attacks on western targets, including a failed airline cargo bomb plot in October 2010 and an attempt the previous year to bring down a US passenger jet over Detroit. Less justifiable, perhaps, was why the US agreed to a secret deal with Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to pass off US attacks on al-Qaida targets as his own.

The cables showed Saleh gave the Americans an “open door” to conduct counter-terrorist missions in Yemen, and to launch cruise missile strikes on Yemeni territory. The first in December 2009 killed dozens of civilians along with alleged militants. Saleh presented it as Yemen’s own work, supported by US intelligence. In a meeting with Gen Petraeus, the head of US central command, Saleh admitted lying to his population about the strikes, and deceiving parliament. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours and not yours,” he told Petraeus. It was a lie the US seemed ready to condone.

As the New York Times’s Bill Keller put it, the documents advanced our knowledge of the world not in great leaps but by small degrees. For those interested in foreign policy, they provided nuance, texture and drama. For those who followed stories less closely, they were able to learn more about international affairs in a lively way. But the cables also included a few jaw-dropping moments, when an entire curtain seemed swept aside to reveal what a country is really like.

The most dramatic such disclosures came not from the Middle East but Russia. It is widely known that Russia – nominally under the control of President Dmitry Medvedev but in reality run by the prime minister, Vladimir Putin – is corrupt and undemocratic. But the cables went much further. They painted a bleak and despairing picture of a kleptocracy centred on Putin’s leadership, in which officials, oligarchs and organised crime are bound together in a “virtual mafia state”.

Arms trafficking, money laundering, personal enrichment, protection for gangsters, extortion and kickbacks, suitcases full of money and secret offshore accounts – the American embassy cables unpicked a political system in which bribery totals an estimated $300bn year, and in which it is often hard to distinguish between the activities of government and organised crime. Read together, the collection of cables offered a rare moment of truth-telling about a regime normally accorded international respectability.

Despite the improvement in US-Russian relations since President Obama took power, the Americans are under no illusions about their Russian interlocutors. The cables stated that Russian spies use senior mafia bosses to carry out criminal operations such as arms trafficking. Law enforcement agencies, meanwhile, such as the police, spy agencies and the prosecutor’s office, run a de facto protection racket for criminal networks. Moscow’s former mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, sacked in 2010 by Medvedev for political reasons, presided over a “pyramid of corruption”, US officials suggested. (Luzkov’s billionaire wife, Yelena Baturina, dismissed the accusations as “total rubbish”.)

Russia’s bureaucracy is so corrupt that it operates what is in effect a parallel tax system for the private enrichment of police, officials, and the KGB’s successor, the federal security service (FSB), the cables said. There have been rumours for years that Putin has personally amassed a secret fortune, hidden overseas. The cables made clear that US diplomats treat the rumours as true: they speculate that Putin deliberately picked a weak successor when he stepped down as Russian president in 2008 because he could be worried about losing his “illicit proceeds” to law enforcement investigations. In Rome, meanwhile, US diplomats relayed suspicions that the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, could be “profiting personally and handsomely” by taking a cut from clandestine energy deals with Putin.

A particularly damning cable about Russia was sent from Madrid. Dated 8 February 2010, it fed back to Washington a briefing by a Spanish prosecutor. Jose Gonzalez spent more than a decade trying to unravel the activities of Russian organised crime in Spain. He met US officials in January and told them that Russia had become a “virtual mafia state” in which “one cannot differentiate between the activities of the government and OC [organised crime] groups.” Gonzalez said he had evidence – thousands of wiretaps have been used in the last 10 years – that certain political parties in Russia worked hand in hand with mafia gangs. He said that intelligence officers orchestrated gun shipments to Kurdish groups to destabilise Turkey and were pulling the strings behind the 2009 case of the Arctic Sea cargo ship suspected of carrying missiles destined for Iran. Gangsters enjoyed support and protection and, in effect, worked “as a complement to state structures”, he told US officials.

Gonzalez said the disaffected Russian intelligence services officer Alexander Litvinenko secretly met Spanish security officials in May 2006, six months before he was murdered in London with radioactive polonium. Litvinenko told the Spanish that Russia’s intelligence and security services controlled the country’s organised crime network. A separate cable from Paris from December 2006 disclosed that US diplomats believed Putin was likely to have known about Litvinenko’s murder. Daniel Fried, then the most senior US diplomat in Europe, claimed it would be remarkable if Russia’s leader knew nothing about the plot given his “attention to detail”. The Russians were behaving with “increasing self-confidence to the point of arrogance”, Fried noted.

The Guardian published WikiLeaks’ Russia disclosures on 2 December 2010, over five pages and under the striking headline: “Inside Putin’s ‘mafia state’”. The front-page photo showed Putin, a former KGB foreign intelligence officer, wearing a pair of dark glasses. For many, the Russia WikiLeaks disclosures were the most vivid to emerge. Janine Gibson, the Guardian’s website editor, was struck by the online response: “The Russia day was brilliant and hugely well read. It was the best day. We were able to say everything you might want to say, but you could never previously say because everybody is so terrified. It was an extraordinary thing.” She went on: “You can tell what the internet thinks about things. You could tell what everyone thought. There was an enormous sense of, ‘Ah-hah!’”

(Across the Atlantic, however, as though determined to cement its reputation for understatement, the New York Times published the same material under a studiedly diffident headline: “In cables, US takes a dim view of Russia”. The contrast between US and British journalistic practices could give future media studies students much to ponder.)

Undoubtedly, the cables showed the dysfunctional nature of the modern Russian state. But they also showcased the state department’s literary strengths. Among many fine writers in the US foreign service, William Burns – Washington’s ambassador to Moscow and now its top diplomat – emerged as the most gifted. Burns has a Rolls-Royce mind. His dispatches on diverse subjects such as Stalin or Solzhenitsyn are gripping, precise and nuanced, combining far-reaching analysis with historical depth. Were it not for the fact that they were supposed to be secret, his musings might have earned him a Pulitzer prize.

In one glorious dispatch Burns described how Chechnya’s ruler Ramzan Kadyrov was the star guest at a raucous Dagestani wedding and “danced clumsily with his gold-plated automatic stuck down the back of his jeans”. During the “lavish” reception Kadyrov showered dancers with $100 notes and gave the happy couple an unusual wedding present – “a five kilo lump of gold”. The ambassador was one of more than 1,000 guests invited to the wedding in Dagestan of the son of the local politician and powerful oil chief Gadzhi Makhachev.

Burns went to dinner at Gadzhi’s “enormous summer house on the balmy shores of the Caspian Sea”. The cast of guests he describes is almost worthy of Evelyn Waugh. They included a Chechen commander (later assassinated), sports and cultural celebrities, “wizened brown peasants”, a nanophysicist, “a drunken wrestler” called Vakha and a first-rank submarine captain. Some were slick, he noted, but others “Jurassic”.

“Most of the tables were set with the usual dishes plus whole roast sturgeons and sheep. But at 8pm the compound was invaded by dozens of heavily armed mujahideen for the grand entrance of the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, looking shorter and less muscular than his photos, and with a somewhat cock-eyed expression on his face.” Kadyrov and his retinue sat at the tables eating and listening to “Benya the Accordion King”, Burns reported. There was a fireworks display followed by lezginka – a traditional Caucasus dance performed by two girls and three small boys. “First Gadzhi joined them and then Ramzan … Both Gadzhi and Ramzan showered the children with $100 bills; the dancers probably picked upwards of $5,000 off the cobblestones.”

This was entertaining and telling stuff, about a region – the north Caucasus – that had fallen off the world’s radar. It was reportage of the best kind.

But there were also disclosures from other troublesome areas that had long been of concern in Washington. Far from being firm, natural allies, for example, as many people had assumed, China had an astonishingly fractious relationship with North Korea. Beijing had even signalled its readiness to accept Korean reunification and was privately distancing itself from the North Korean regime, the cables showed. The Chinese were no longer willing to offer support for Kim Jong-il’s bizarre dictatorship, it seemed.

China’s emerging position was revealed in sensitive discussions between Kathleen Stephens, the US ambassador to Seoul, and South Korea’s vice foreign minister, Chun Yung-woo. Citing two high-ranking Chinese officials, Chun told the ambassador that younger-generation Chinese Communist Party leaders no longer regarded North Korea as a useful or reliable ally. Moreover, they would not risk renewed armed conflict on the peninsula, he stated. The cable read: “The two officials, Chun said, were ready to ‘face the new reality’ that the DPRK [North Korea] now had little value to China as a buffer state – a view that, since North Korea’s first nuclear test in 2006, had reportedly gained traction among senior PRC [People’s Republic of China] leaders.”

It is astonishing to hear the Chinese position described in this way. Envisaging North Korea’s collapse, the cable said, “the PRC would be comfortable with a reunified Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the United States in a ‘benign alliance’ – as long as Korea was not hostile towards China.” The Chinese, in short, were fed up with their troublesome North Korean neighbours. In April 2009 Pyongyang blasted a three-stage rocket over Japan and into the Pacific in an act of pure belligerence. China’s vice foreign minister He Yafei was unimpressed. He told US embassy officials that the North Koreans were behaving like a “spoiled child” to get Washington’s attention. This was all new.

The cables also disclosed, ominously for the internet future, that Google had been forced to withdraw from mainland China merely because of an unfortunate piece of bad luck. A senior member of the Communist Party used the search engine to look for his own name. He was unhappy with what he found: several articles criticising him personally. As a result Google was forced to drop a link from its Chinese-language search engine to its uncensored Google.com page and – as the cable put it – “walk away from a potential market of 400 million internet users”.

*

As far as the UK was concerned, the cables made distinctly uncomfortable reading. Educated Americans frequently regard Britain’s royal family with amused disdain, as a Ruritanian throwback. Rob Evans of the Guardian realised that, and had rapidly discovered a pen portrait which shed painful light on Prince Andrew, one of the Queen’s sons. Andrew, who was regularly flown around the world at the British taxpayers’ expense as a “special trade representative”, was the subject of an acid cable back to Washington from faraway Kyrgyzstan. He emerged as rude, blustering, guffawing about local bribery, and – to the shocked delight of reporters at the Guardian – highly offensive about their own newspaper’s exposures of corruption. The US ambassador quoted him denouncing “these (expletive) reporters, especially from the National [sic] Guardian, who poke their noses everywhere’ and (presumably) make it harder for British businessmen to do business.”

Less comic was the overall tone adopted by the Americans towards their junior UK allies, who craved a “special relationship”. While there was evidence everywhere of the intimacy and intelligence-sharing which went on worldwide between the two Anglophone states, there were also signs of a condescending attitude. The cables showed that the US superpower was mainly interested in its own priorities: it wanted unrestricted use of British military bases; it wanted British politicians to send troops for its wars and aid its sanctions campaigns, against Iran in particular; and it wanted the UK to buy American arms and commercial products. Richard LeBaron, the US charge d’affaires at the Grosvenor Square embassy in London, recommended that the US continue to pander to British fantasies that their relationship was special: “Though tempting to argue that keeping HMG [Her Majesty’s government] off balance about its current standing with us might make London more willing to respond favourably when pressed for assistance, in the long run it is not in US interests to have the UK public concluding the relationship is weakening, on either side. The UK’s commitment of resources – financial, military, diplomatic – in support of US global priorities remains unparalleled.”

In the leaked cables, the unequal relationship between senior and junior partners was visibly played out. When then British foreign secretary David Miliband tried to hamper secret US spy flights from Britain’s Cyprus base, he was peremptorily yanked back into line. When Britain similarly thought of barring US cluster bombs from its own territory on Diego Garcia, the Americans soon put a stop to it. Britain even offered to declare the area around the US Diego Garcia base a marine nature reserve, so the evicted islanders could never go back. However, when Gordon Brown, as British prime minister, personally pleaded in return for compassion for Gary McKinnon, a British youthful computer hacker wanted for extradition, his plea was humiliatingly ignored. The incoming British Conservative administration, headed by foreign secretary-designate William Hague, lined up cravenly to promise the US ambassador a “pro-American regime”.

Sifting through this huge database of diplomatic documents, it was hard not to come away with a depressing view of human nature. Mankind, the world over, seemed revealed as a base, grasping species. Many political leaders showed remarkable greed and venality. One of the most egregious examples was Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president. He was reported to have siphoned as much as $9 billion out of the country, and stashed much of it in London banks. A conversation with the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court said some of the funds may be held by Lloyds Bank in London. The bank denied any connection.

It was a similar story in Afghanistan, a regime – like Russia – sliding into kleptocracy. The cables show fears of rampant government corruption; the US is apparently powerless to do anything about it. In one astonishing alleged incident in October 2009, US diplomats claimed that the then vice-president Ahmad Zia Massoud was stopped and questioned in Dubai, after flying into the emirate carrying $52 million in cash. Officials trying to stop money laundering interviewed him. Then they let him go. (Massoud denies this happened.)

The US was also deeply frustrated by Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s leader. It regarded him as erratic, emotional, prone to believing conspiracy theories – and linked to criminal warlords. US diplomats spelled out their conviction that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s younger half brother and a senior figure in Kandahar, is corrupt.

Some of the world’s biggest companies have also been involved in dubious practices and dirty tricks, the communiqués alleged. Shell’s vice-president for sub-Saharan Africa boasted that the oil giant had successfully inserted staff into all of the main ministries of Nigeria’s government. Shell was so well placed that it knew of the government’s plans to invite bids for oil concessions. The Shell executive, Anne Pickard, told the US ambassador Robin Renee Sanders that Shell had seconded employees to every government department so knew “everything that was being done in those ministries”.

The revelations appeared to confirm what campaigners had long been saying: that there were intersecting links between the oil giant and politicians in a country where, despite billions of dollars in oil revenue, 70% of people still lived below the poverty line.

Pfizer, the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company, was also identified in Africa dispatches. According to a leaked cable from the US embassy in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, Pfizer hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the country’s attorney general. The drug firm wanted to pressure him to drop legal action over a controversial drug trial involving children with meningitis. Pfizer denies wrongdoing. It says it has now resolved a case brought in 2009 by Nigeria’s government and Kano state, where the drug was used during a meningitis outbreak.

*

What did this worldwide pattern of diplomatic secrets actually all mean? Some commentators saw it as proof that the United States was struggling to get its way in the world, a superpower entering a long period of relative decline. Others thought the revelations at least showed the bureaucracy of the state department in a fairly good light. In the Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash confessed he had been impressed by the professionalism of the US diplomatic corps – a hard-working and committed bunch. “My personal opinion of the state department has gone up several notches,” he wrote. “For the most part … what we see here is diplomats doing their proper job: finding out what is happening in places to which they are posted, working to advance their nation’s interests and their government’s policies.”

Some world leaders brushed off the embarrassing revelations, at least in public, while others went on the attack. Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who did not come out well in the disclosures of his regional unpopularity, dismissed the WikiLeaks data drop as “psychological warfare”. He claimed the US must have deliberately leaked its own files in a plot to discredit him. Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, reacted furiously to cables that suggested he was a corrupt closet Islamist. But in countries where there is no free press – Eritrea is a good example, but there are lots of them – there was no reaction at all, only silence.

The Russians executed a remarkable handbrake turn. President Medvedev at first dismissed the Russia cables as “not worthy” of comment. But when it became clear that the leak was far more damaging in the long-term to the US and its multilateral interests, one of Medvedev’s aides proposed, tongue-in-cheek, that Julian Assange should be nominated for the Nobel peace prize.

It was Assange himself that dominated the coverage in Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald hailed Assange as the “Ned Kelly of the internet age”, in reference to the country’s 19th-century outlaw folk hero. However, Australia’s prime minister, Julia Gillard, behaved more like the rest of the irritated world leaders: she condemned the publication as illegal, and Assange’s actions as “grossly irresponsible”. The cables themselves revealed an unflattering view of Australia’s political class. The former prime minister – now foreign minister – Kevin Rudd was called an abrasive, impulsive “control freak” presiding over a series of foreign policy blunders.

Was the Big Leak of the cables changing anything? As the year ended, it was for the most part too early to say. The short-term fall-out in some cases was certainly rapid, with diplomats shuffled and officials made to walk the plank. Der Spiegel reported that a “well-placed source” within the Free Democratic Party had been briefing the US embassy about secret coalition negotiations in the immediate aftermath of the German general election in 2009. The mysterious man was quickly outed as Helmut Metzner, head of the office of party chairman and vice-chancellor Guido Westerwelle. Metzner lost his job.

In January 2011 Washington was forced to withdraw its ambassador from Libya, Gene Cretz. Colonel Gadaffi had clearly been stung by comments concerning his long-time Ukrainian nurse – a “voluptuous blonde”, as Cretz put it. Other US diplomatic staff were also quietly told to pack their bags and move on. Sylvia Reed Curran, the charge d’affaires in Ashgabat, was reassigned after penning an excoriating profile of Turkmenistan’s president, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov. She described him as “vain, suspicious, guarded, strict, very conservative”, a “micro-manager” and “a practised liar”. She added, memorably: “Berdymukhamedov does not like people who are smarter than he is. Since he’s not a very bright guy, our source offered, he is suspicious of a lot of people.”

Curran’s fate? She was sent to Vladivostok, where the sun rarely shines.

Some other developments were positive and suggested that WikiLeaks’ mission to winkle out secrets might help bring results. One cable, from the US embassy in Bangladesh, showed the British government was training a paramilitary force condemned by human rights organisations as a “government death squad”, held responsible for hundreds of extrajudicial killings. The British were revealed to be training the “Rapid Action Battalion” in investigative interviewing techniques and “rules of engagement”. Since the squad’s exposure in the cables, no more deaths have been announced.

In Tunisia, the country’s repressive president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, blocked the website of a Lebanese newspaper that published cables about his regime. The reports from the US embassy in Tunis were deeply unflattering, and made no bones about the sclerotic state of the small Maghreb country, widely considered one of the most repressive in a repressive region. “The problem is clear,” wrote ambassador Robert Godec in July 2009, in a secret dispatch released by Beirut’s al-Akhbar newspaper. “Tunisia has been ruled by the same president for 22 years. He has no successor. And, while President Ben Ali deserves credit for continuing many of the progressive policies of [predecessor] President Bourguiba, he and his regime have lost touch with the Tunisian people. They tolerate no advice or criticism, whether domestic or international. Increasingly, they rely on the police for control and focus on preserving power.”

The cable went on: “Corruption in the inner circle is growing. Even average Tunisians are keenly aware of it, and the chorus of complaints is rising. Tunisians intensely dislike, even hate, first lady Leila Trabelsi and her family. In private, regime opponents mock her; even those close to the government express dismay at her reported behaviour. Meanwhile, anger is growing at Tunisia’s high unemployment and regional inequities. As a consequence, the risks to the regime’s long-term stability are increasing.”

The ambassador’s comments were prescient. Within a month of the cable’s publication, Tunisia was in the grip of what some were calling the first WikiLeaks revolution.