Cablegate: American diplomacy on the record

The memory stick was small enough to hang on a keyring. On it, the Guardian later wrote, were 1.6 gigabytes of text: 251,287 dispatches sent from, or to, more than 250 US embassies and consulates, classified up to ‘SECRET NOFORN’ – not to be shown to foreigners. On Sunday 28 November 2010 the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El País began publishing stories drawn from them, and we at WikiLeaks began posting cables of our own, with names redacted.

What followed was, in the Guardian’s words, an unprecedented picture of secret diplomacy. Ten months later it also produced a bitter dispute between us and our former partners over how the full, unredacted archive came to be published – and whether anyone was harmed as a result.

The archive

Cables marked ‘Sipdis’ were loaded automatically on to secure embassy websites linked to Siprnet, the US military’s classified network – part of an information-sharing drive after the 11 September attacks. More than three million US government personnel and soldiers were cleared to have potential access. More than 11,000 cables were marked secret and around 9,000 ‘noforn’; none was ‘top secret’. Some had been sent as recently as February 2010.

The US military already suspected the source: Chelsea Manning, an army intelligence analyst who had served near Baghdad and was by then in military custody. In 2013 a court martial convicted Manning of offences relating to the transmission of US government material to us.

Publishing with redactions

The five newspapers agreed neither to ‘dump’ the archive nor to publish names that would endanger innocent people. We said we, too, would initially post only limited extracts and redact identities, and over the following months we released cables gradually, in conjunction with our partners.

Before publication we had written to the US government seeking help to limit the harm to individuals. The reply, dated 27 November, from the State Department’s legal adviser, Harold Koh, demanded instead that we stop publication and destroy our records of the material, and warned that release would ‘place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals – from journalists to human rights activists and bloggers to soldiers to individuals providing information to further peace and security’. The letter also referred to the government’s own conversations with the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel about the material.

What the cables showed

Many of the most widely read cables were simply candid; some had consequences. In Tunisia, a June 2008 embassy cable, classified secret by Ambassador Robert Godec, described President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s extended family as the nexus of corruption, ‘often referred to as a quasi-mafia’. Its summary began:

The cable added that persistent rumours of corruption, together with inflation and unemployment, had ‘helped to fuel frustration’ with the government. Tunisians hardly needed telling; what was new was reading it in the words of American diplomats. When Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia on 14 January 2011 after weeks of mass protests, the Guardian noted that Tunisians had been ‘riveted’ by the cables the previous month. Their contribution to the uprising cannot be measured.

At the United Nations, a ‘National HUMINT Collection Directive’ dated 31 July 2009 asked for details of the communications systems used by UN officials, down to ‘passwords, personal encryption keys’, and sought biographic details including credit card and frequent flyer account numbers. The Guardian reported that such directives were issued in the name of Hillary Clinton or her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice; this one states that it replaced a 2004 version. The State Department spokesman, PJ Crowley, insisted that ‘our diplomats are just that, diplomats’, who ‘do not engage in intelligence activities’.

On Iran, the cables showed Arab leaders privately urging a military strike. A Riyadh cable of April 2008 records the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, recalling King Abdullah’s ‘frequent exhortations to the US to attack Iran’: ‘He told you to cut off the head of the snake.’ The same cable records the foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, calling instead for much more severe sanctions – a reminder that the cables captured arguments, not settled policy.

September 2011: the unredacted archive

By August 2011 relations between me and several former associates had broken down. The sequence below follows the chronology in the judgment of my London extradition hearing, compiled by the US partly from a defence expert’s evidence. Several points remain disputed.

• Summer 2010: I give the Guardian’s David Leigh access to the unredacted cables in an encrypted file. Leigh says he had always been told the password was temporary.
• December 2010: amid online attacks, we at WikiLeaks encourage ‘mirroring’ of our website; the Guardian later reported that a WikiLeaks activist also put an encrypted copy of the cables on BitTorrent as insurance.
• February 2011: the Guardian’s book on the cables is published, containing the password. My side says the password could not be changed; Leigh calls my version ‘a complete invention’.
• 23–30 August 2011: we release around 134,000 cables. The US says many were classified and contained names marked ‘strictly protect’; my defence said they were unclassified and disputed that harm followed.
• 25 and 29 August: Der Freitag reports that an encrypted copy of the cables is online; Der Spiegel reports that the password has been revealed.
• 31 August: we publish an editorial identifying Leigh’s book as the source of the password.
• 1 September: the decrypted cables are uploaded to the Pirate Bay and published by Cryptome.
• 2 September, 01:20: we publish the entire archive, unredacted and searchable.

The Guardian said it had been led to believe the file was temporary, and reported a former associate’s claim that I had reused a master password; we blamed the Guardian. According to the US, I telephoned the US government days before publication to say I feared for informants’ safety. The US argued that our reach and active promotion made our release more damaging than the earlier uploads; my defence said the material was already public and we had not been first. The former partners were united:

Reporters Without Borders withdrew its mirror of our site. The Guardian counted more than 1,000 cables identifying individual activists, several thousand carrying the tag the US used for sources it believed could be endangered, and more than 150 specifically mentioning whistleblowers.

The question of harm

The US government set out its case most fully in the extradition proceedings. In declarations supporting the request, Gordon Kromberg said that well over a hundred people had been placed at risk and about fifty had sought and received US help, some moving with their families to the United States or safe third countries; some lost jobs or had assets frozen. The US also said some people had ‘disappeared’, while accepting that it could not prove this resulted from being named by us.

Harm short of death was alleged. In September 2011 the Committee to Protect Journalists said the Ethiopian journalist Argaw Ashine had left his country after being questioned by officials following publication of a cable that named him. We at WikiLeaks called CPJ’s account misleading, saying he was mentioned only in passing and was not identified as an informant, and an Ethiopian government spokesman said no journalists had been interrogated.

Requests for a concrete example of a death produced none. At Manning’s sentencing hearing in July 2013, Brigadier General Robert Carr, who had led the Pentagon’s Information Review Task Force into the WikiLeaks disclosures, was pressed for one. ‘I don’t have a specific example,’ he said. His reference to an Afghan man the Taliban claimed to have killed in connection with the war logs was struck from the record after he conceded that the man’s name did not appear in the leaked material. When my case ended in 2024, the judge in Saipan recorded the prosecution’s position.

The State Department maintained that my actions had put lives at risk and said it had done ‘an extraordinary amount of work’ to get people out of harm’s way once it learned the cables would be published; asked repeatedly by reporters for examples of harm, its spokesperson gave none.

Neither side’s strongest claim survives the record intact. The absence of a proven death is not proof that no one was harmed: people were relocated, at least one journalist left his country, and the names of activists and confidential sources were published for anyone to read. Nor does that risk erase what the cables revealed, or the care taken over the redacted publications that came first. In her January 2021 ruling, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser contrasted my ‘final, indiscriminate disclosure’ with the newspapers’ ‘careful editorial decisions’ – but she left the questions of who first exposed the archive, and whether harm followed, to be decided at a trial. She refused extradition on the ground of my mental health, and the trial never took place.