In 1856, Townsend Harris became the Unites States’s first diplomat in Japan, after that country had been pressed into opening up to the West after centuries of isolation. As the US’s newly ensconced representative, Harris’s key tasks were to negotiate agreements on trade and the proper treatment of shipwrecked sailors.
Harris kept a meticulous diary during his assignment and frequently wrote to the president and secretary of state about his progress and his observations about Japanese politics. At one point, he lamented that for more than 18 months he had received no response from Washington to his reports about his negotiations with the Japanese. No diplomat today would ever complain about a lack of instruction or guidance.
Harris served in Japan just before the telegraphic age. He had to send his handwritten reports and personal mail with the captain of the most recent passing foreign ship, in the hope that his dispatches would eventually reach the US. And of course his answers followed the same torturous route back.
But by the 1880s diplomats were sending their most urgent messages through the new global telegraphic network. The telegraph — with its charges by the word — put great store on brevity and wit. Best practice would have echoed British general Charles Napier’s reported dispatch, titled “Peccavi”, translated from the Latin as “I have sinned”, thereby encapsulating his victory in the Sind region — just as long as you knew your Latin.
The commercial telegraph system for messages to and from embassies also meant the adoption of hard-to-break diplomatic codes. The use of these codes then led competing governments to try to break their opponents’ codes to stay ahead.
In 1916, with World War I underway, but before the US entered on the side of the Allies, the German foreign ministry instructed its ambassador to Mexico to entice Mexico to go to war on the side of Germany if the US entered the war, with a promise of the return of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to Mexico once the US was beaten. But the Americans deciphered the German cable and the release of its contents helped swing US public opinion decisively towards Britain and France.
By the 1920s, however, nations increasingly turned to government-managed wireless transmission for coded, confidential diplomatic traffic. This led to even more vigorous efforts around the world to break such codes, even though the then US secretary of state Henry Stimson temporarily ended US efforts to break Japanese codes with his high-minded but impractical edict: “Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s mail.”
After World War II, George Kennan, the US’s top Russia specialist, then the US embassy’s deputy chief of mission in the then USSR, wrote what became known as “the Long Telegram” — almost certainly the US’s most famous bit of diplomatic reportage. In 1946, Washington asked Kennan’s embassy for an evaluation of why the Russians were refusing to join the new international financial institutions. Kennan seized the opportunity to provide a much broader explanation of Soviet behaviour, thereby setting out a framework for the US policy that became “containment”.
Mindful of the then limited capacity of diplomatic communication circuits, Kennan began by noting that his answer “involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that I cannot compress answers into a single brief message without yielding to what I feel would be a dangerous degree of oversimplification. I hope, therefore, [the deptartment] will bear with me if I submit in answer to this question five parts — “
Kennan’s cable swiftly came to the attention of the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, who prevailed upon him to reshape his telegram into an article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”, published in 1947 under the pseudonym “X”, although it was soon obvious to everyone who “X” was. Secrets were hard to keep then — and now. Kennan’s article soon morphed into the foundation for US policy, deeply influencing how Americans dealt with the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War and then influencing American thinking towards China or even radical Islam.
Most official cables, at least until WikiLeaks, haven’t had Kennan’s readership. The real hallmark of most state-department reporting represents a curious contradiction: the best reporting must read like a combination of Bruce Chatwin’s travel reportage, a P J O’Rourke article from Rolling Stone, and a Tom Friedman column in the New York Times, even though its highly placed readership may number in the dozens rather than millions.
The system is designed so that cables with observations that can actually influence policy-makers will be highly classified, accessible only to those with the “need to know”.
Although the bulk of diplomatic traffic — now transferred by digital data lines and read electronically — concerns quotidian things such as approvals for leases or building maintenance, visa approvals and refusals, and travel allowances for official visitors, the system segregates more sensitive (or potentially embarrassing) information into a system of secrecy levels and determinations about a person’s “need to know”.
But, in the wake of 9/11, the overall system seems to have been altered to give many more people access to what became a vast electronic database of cables and other messages. Ironically, that created the opportunity for someone to give WikiLeaks its recent troves of classified material.
At least until now, rather than actually threatening global peace — who really didn’t already know that Silvio Berlusconi was a major party animal or that Vladimir Putin has acted as if he wants to play Batman to Dmitry Medvedev’s Robin — WikiLeaks’ major impact has been to lay open the world of diplomatic communication, allowing everyone to contemplate American and other diplomats as they try to make sense of the world — and those who would turn things upside-down if they could.
Although Julian Assange’s duel with the US may yet morph into something still more challenging than it has so far, if Russian and Chinese messages, multinational corporate business secrets and Iranian or North Korean diplomatic traffic start appearing on WikiLeaks or another website, we’ll know the world has truly changed.
J Brooks Spector is a retired US diplomat and a contributing editor of online publication the Daily Maverick.