WASHINGTON – The United States has, since 2007, mounted a highly secret effort to remove from a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device, according to classified documents published on the New York TimesÂ’ website Sunday afternoon.
The effort has so far been unsuccessful, the Times said, without naming the research reactor.
“In May 2009, Ambassador Anne Patterson reported that Pakistan was refusing to schedule a visit by American technical experts because, as a Pakistani official said, ‘If the local media got word of the fuel removal, they certainly would portray it as the United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,’ according to the newspaper, citing the documents.
The Time said the cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an unprecedented look at backroom bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.
Some of the cables, made available to The New York Times and several other news organisations, were written as recently as late February, revealing the Obama administrationÂ’s exchanges over crises and conflicts. The material was originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organisation devoted to revealing secret documents. WikiLeaks intends to make the archive public on its Website in batches, beginning Sunday.
“The anticipated disclosure of the cables is already sending shudders through the diplomatic establishment, and could conceivably strain relations with some countries, influencing international affairs in ways that are impossible to predict,” the Times said.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and American ambassadors around the world have been contacting foreign officials, incuding Pakistan, in recent days to alert them to the expected disclosures. On Saturday, the State DepartmentÂ’s legal adviser, Harold Hongju Koh, wrote to a lawyer for WikiLeaks informing the organization that the distribution of the cables was illegal and could endanger lives, disrupt military and counterterrorism operations and undermine international cooperation against nuclear proliferation and other threats.
The cables, a huge sampling of the daily traffic between the State Department and some 270 embassies and consulates, amount to a secret chronicle of the United StatesÂ’ relations with the world in an age of war and terrorism, according to the newspaper.
Among their revelations, to be detailed in The Times in coming days:
The cables show that nearly a decade after the attacks of Sept 11, 2001, the dark shadow of terrorism still dominates the United States’ relations with the world. “They depict the Obama administration struggling to sort out which Pakistanis are trustworthy partners against Al-Qaeda, adding Australians who have disappeared in the Middle East to terrorist watch lists, and assessing whether a lurking rickshaw driver in Lahore, Pakistan, was awaiting fares or conducting surveillance of the road to the American Consulate,” it said.
The cables also disclose frank comments behind closed doors. Dispatches from early this year, for instance, quote the aging monarch of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah, as speaking scathingly about the leaders of Iraq and Pakistan.
Speaking to another Iraqi official about Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, King Abdullah said, “You and Iraq are in my heart, but that man is not.” The king called President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan the greatest obstacle to that country’s progress. “When the head is rotten,” he said, “it affects the whole body,” according to the Times quoting the secret documents.
Saudi princes remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al-Qaeda, and the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar, a generous host to the American military for years, was the “worst in the region” in counterterrorism efforts, according to a State Department cable last December. Qatar’s security service was “hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the US and provoking reprisals,” the cable said.
¶ Suspicions of corruption in the Afghan government: When Afghanistan’s vice president visited the United Arab Emirates last year, local authorities working with the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered that he was carrying $52 million in cash. With wry understatement, a cable from the American Embassy in Kabul called the money “a significant amount” that the official, Ahmed Zia Massoud, “was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the money’s origin or destination.” (Mr. Massoud denies taking any money out of Afghanistan.)
¶ A global computer hacking effort: China’s Politburo directed the intrusion into Google’s computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. They have broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002, cables said.
¶ American and South Korean officials have discussed the prospects for a unified Korea, should the North’s economic troubles and political transition lead the state to implode. The South Koreans even considered commercial inducements to China, according to the American ambassador to Seoul. She told Washington in February that South Korean officials believe that the right business deals would “help salve” China’s “concerns about living with a reunified Korea” that is in a “benign alliance” with the United States.
When American diplomats pressed other countries to resettle detainees, they became reluctant players in a State Department version of “Let’s Make a Deal.” Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in a group of detainees, cables from diplomats recounted. The Americans, meanwhile, suggested that accepting more prisoners would be “a low-cost way for Belgium to attain prominence in Europe.”
American diplomats in Rome reported in 2009 on what their Italian contacts described as an extraordinarily close relationship between Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian prime minister, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister and business magnate, including “lavish gifts,” lucrative energy contracts and a “shadowy” Russian-speaking Italian go-between. They wrote that Mr. Berlusconi “appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin” in Europe. The diplomats also noted that while Mr Putin enjoys supremacy over all other public figures in Russia, he is undermined by an unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignores his edicts.
Cables describe the United States’ failing struggle to prevent Syria from supplying arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has amassed a huge stockpile since its 2006 war with Israel. One week after President Bashar al-Assad promised a top State Department official that he would not send “new” arms to Hezbollah, the United States complained that it had information that Syria was providing increasingly sophisticated weapons to the group. ¶ Clashes with Europe over human rights: American officials sharply warned Germany in 2007 not to enforce arrest warrants for Central Intelligence Agency officers involved in a bungled operation in which an innocent German citizen with the same name as a suspected militant was mistakenly kidnapped and held for months in Afghanistan. A senior American diplomat told a German official “that our intention was not to threaten Germany, but rather to urge that the German government weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for relations with the US”
The 251,287 cables, first acquired by WikiLeaks, were provided to The Times by an intermediary on the condition of anonymity. Many are unclassified, and none are marked “top secret,” the government’s most secure communications status, the paper said. But some 11,000 are classified “secret,” 9,000 are labeled “noforn,” shorthand for material considered too delicate to be shared with any foreign government, and 4,000 are designated both secret and noforn.
Many more cables name diplomats’ confidential sources, from foreign legislators and military officers to human rights activists and journalists, often with a warning to Washington: “Please protect” or “Strictly protect.”
The Times said it has withheld from articles and removed from documents it is posting online the names of some people who spoke privately to diplomats and might be at risk if they were publicly identified. The Times is also withholding some passages or entire cables whose disclosure could compromise American intelligence efforts.
They show American officials managing relations with a China on the rise and a Russia retreating from democracy, the paper said. They document years of painstaking effort to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon – and of worry about a possible Israeli strike on Iran with the same goal.
Even when they recount events that are already known, the cables offer remarkable details.
For instance, it has been previously reported that the Yemeni government has sought to cover up the American role in missile strikes against the local branch of Al Qaeda. But a cableÂ’s fly-on-the-wall account of a January meeting between the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and Gen. David Petraeus, then the American commander in the Middle East, is nonetheless breathtaking.
“We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh said, according to the cable sent by the American ambassador, prompting Yemen’s deputy prime minister to “joke that he had just ‘lied’ by telling Parliament” that Yemeni forces had carried out the strikes.
Saleh, who at other times resisted American counterterrorism requests, was in a lighthearted mood. The authoritarian ruler of a conservative Muslim country, Saleh complains of smuggling from nearby Djibouti, but tells General Petraeus that his concerns are drugs and weapons, not whiskey, “provided it’s good whiskey.”
Likewise, press reports detailed the unhappiness of the Libyan leader, Col Muammar Qaddafi, when he was not permitted to set up his tent in Manhattan or to visit ground zero during a United Nations session last year.
But the cables add to the tale a touch of scandal and alarm. They describe the volatile Libyan leader as rarely without the companionship of “his senior Ukrainian nurse,” described as “a voluptuous blonde.” They reveal that Colonel Qaddafi was so upset by his reception in New York that he balked at carrying out a promise to return dangerous enriched uranium to Russia. The American ambassador to Libya told Colonel Qaddafi’s son “that the Libyan government had chosen a very dangerous venue to express its pique,” a cable reported to Washington.
The American ambassador to Eritrea reported last year that “Eritrean officials are ignorant or lying” in denying that they were supporting the Shabab, a militant group in Somalia. The cable then mused about which seemed more likely.
As he left Zimbabwe in 2007 after three years as ambassador, Christopher W Dell wrote a sardonic account of Robert Mugabe, that country’s aging and erratic leader. The cable called Mr Mugabe “a brilliant tactician” but mocked “his deep ignorance on economic issues (coupled with the belief that his 18 doctorates give him the authority to suspend the laws of economics).”
The possibility that a large number of diplomatic cables might become public has been discussed in government and media circles since May. That was when, in an online chat, an Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, described having downloaded from a military computer system many classified documents, including “260,000 State Department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world.” In an online discussion with Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker, Private Manning said he had delivered the cables and other documents to WikiLeaks.
The White House condemned on Sunday WikiLeaks’ “reckless and dangerous action” in releasing classified US diplomatic cables, saying it could endanger lives and risk hurting relations with friendly countries.
State Department documents released by whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks provided candid views of foreign leaders and sensitive information on terrorism and nuclear proliferation, The New York Times reported on Sunday.
“These cables could compromise private discussions with foreign governments and opposition leaders, and when the substance of private conversations is printed on the front pages of newspapers across the world, it can deeply impact not only US foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a statement.
By their nature, the cables often contained incomplete information and were not an expression of policy, he said.
“Such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world who come to the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open government,” Gibbs said.
He said the cables may include the names of pro-democracy activists living “under oppressive regimes.”
Agencies add: Earlier, WikiLeaks said Sunday it was under a cyber attack but stressed this would not stop the publication of classified US documents, in a message on Twitter.
“We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack,” the whistle-blower website said in a statement on its Twitter feed, just hours before an expected mass release of the documents.
But it insisted that the Spanish, French, German, British and US newspapers that were planning to publish the information later Sunday would go ahead, in the face of strong opposition from the United States.
The WikiLeaks website was not immediately accessible.
As WikiLeaks released 250,000 diplomatic cables to The New York Times on Sunday, the Defense Department announced a series of measures undertaken in recent months to “prevent further compromise of sensitive data.”
The steps were taken after Pentagon reviews launched in August that followed the disclosure of tens of thousands of US military intelligence files on the war in Afghanistan.
The measures included disabling all write capability for thumb drives or removable media on classified computers, restricting transfers of information from classified to unclassified systems and better monitoring of suspicious computer activity using similar tactics employed by credit card companies, Whitman said.
“Bottom line: It is now much more difficult for a determined actor to get access to and move information outside of authorized channels,” Whitman said.
The leaked documents say that US intelligence believes Iran has obtained advanced missiles from North Korea capable of striking Europe, according to US documents leaked by WikiLeaks and cited by the New York Times on Sunday.
The newspaper, in a diplomatic cable dated February 24, said “secret American intelligence assessments have concluded that Iran has obtained a cache of advanced missiles, based on a Russian design.”
Iran obtained 19 of the North Korean missiles, an improved version of Russia’s R-27, from North Korea, the cable said, and was “taking pains to master the technology in an attempt to build a new generation of missiles.”
At the request of US President Barack ObamaÂ’s administration, the New York Times said it had agreed not to publish the text of that cable.
“The North Korean version of the advanced missile, known as the BM-25, could carry a nuclear warhead,” said the newspaper, adding it had a range of up to 3,000 kilometres.
“If fired from Iran, that range, in theory, would let its warheads reach targets as far away as Western Europe, including Berlin. If fired northwestward, the warheads could reach Moscow,” it said, referring to other dispatches.
“The cables say that Iran not only obtained the BM-25, but also saw the advanced technology as a way to learn how to design and build a new class of more powerful engines,” said the Times.
King Abdullah urged the United States to attack Iran to destroy its nuclear programme, BritainÂ’s Guardian newspaper said Sunday.
Leaked memos from US embassies across the Middle East recorded the king’s “frequent exhortations to the US to attack Iran and so put an end to its nuclear weapons programme.”
The memo showed that the king told the United States to “cut off the head of the snake,” and said that working with Washington to roll back Iranian influence in Iraq was “a strategic priority for the king and his government.”
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is referred to as ‘Hitler’ while President Nicolas Sarkozy of France is called a ‘naked emperor’ in US documents released by Wikilieaks on Sunday.
Pages from the German newspaper Der Spiegel were leaked early, before a mass publication of thousands of secret cables by the whiste-blowing website.
The documents also say that North Korean leader Kim Jong -il suffers from epilepsy, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddhafi’s full-time nurse is a “hot blond”.
The German Chancellor is referred to as Angela “Teflon” Merkel and Afghan President Hamid Karzai is “driven by paranoia”, the documents claim.
US officials referred to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as an “Alpha Male,” while President Dmitry Medvedev is “afraid, hesitant.”
Der Spiegel also quoted the State Department as saying that President Barack Obama “prefers to look East rather than West,” and “has no feelings for Europe”.