WikiLeaks (30 page)

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.)