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
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”.
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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
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 communiques 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
