Our bite of Wikileaks’ treasure trove of US diplomatic cables
When Wikileaks started making noises about releasing 250,000 US diplomatic cables from around the world, I was immediately fascinated. I have a long-standing interest in diplomacy and how government's interact with each other behind the scenes after studying International Relations for a spell while working in London and working for a short while as a diplomatic correspondent for the Sunday Times in Pretoria on my return from London.
The Wikileaks stash promised to be a treasure trove of stories and insight into such affairs.
Of course, there was also the promise of some really fascinating stories about South Africa as US diplomatic missions have been active and intimate with South Africa's affairs for decades.
Like many journalists I assumed that Wikileaks would do like it did with the Iraq war material and release pretty much all of it at once, but, alas this was not to be and the cables have been slowly trickling out with only about 11 cables relating to South Africa out of the 1800 or so which have been released on the Wikileaks site (and its mirrors) to date.
To make matters tantalisingly worse, the Guardian published an index of the cables which suggested that there were more than 1900 cables relating to South Africa in the collection. That's like waving a ripe Stilton under the nose of a starving mouse!
I was determined that we in the Media24 Investigations team would lay our hands on a large portion, or all, of the cables relating to South Africa. Over the last couple of weeks myself and other members of the investigation team made calls to anyone and everyone we could think of who could assist provide us with access. There were promising signs of assistance from various quarters but all came to naught... until late last week when our ship came in.
I am not even going to hint at how we got these cables or how many there are (except to say there are lots) as I know the US authorities and their representatives here in South Africa are keenly interested in answering that question (you know who you are, wink, wink). But I owe the entity/person/persons/source/sources responsible a huge thanks for dropping them into my lap and for the retrospective view they allow us about recent and not so recent events in our country through the prism of a global superpower.
Yesterday Julian Rademeyer wrote the first piece generated by these documents, a rather amusing story about US Congressmen having tea with Robert Mugabe last year. (Read the whole cable here) We have another, harder piece for City Press and Rapport this weekend relating to one of South Africa's political parties, so don't miss those papers even though its the Christmas weekend.
So far I have identified more than a dozen stories from the cables that I have read. They provide insight into political power plays in South Africa, some fascinating insights into some aspects of South African foreign policy and a number of other areas and issues and we'll be working on breaking more of these stories in the weeks to come.
Like all journalists dealing with this material, we are aware of the sensitivity of some of these documents and the potential danger to diplomatic sources and we'll be handling this information with the same responsibility that journalists around the world have exhibited.
One over-arching impression that I am left with is how incredibly hard-working US diplomats are. The volume of material they generate, the depth of analysis and range of subjects they follow is quite astounding.
